Journal articles on the topic 'Electronic surveillance – political aspects – united states'

Nearly 2.5 million Americans currently reside in nursing homes and assisted living facilities in the United States, accounting for approximately five percent of persons sixty-five and older. The aging of the “Baby Boomer” generation is expected to lead to an exponential growth in the need for some form of long-term care (LTC) for this segment of the population within the next twenty-five years. In light of these sobering demographic shifts, there is an urgency to address the profound concerns that exist about the quality-of-care (QoC) and quality-of-life (QoL) of this frailest segment of our population.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies in western democracies are turning increasingly to electronic surveillance tools in their efforts to identify and combat new terrorist threats. But this does not mean that they are equally equipped to undertake these measures. As the author shows by comparing surveillance activities in three countries—Great Britain, the United States, and Germany—the Federal Republic's more restrictive legal norms and institutions provide its government with much less freedom of maneuver than its allies.

The article analyses military and political factors of cooperation between Finland and the United States since 1990s up to the present. The author attempts to show the role Finnish defence forces in the US military reinforcement plans in the Northern European Theater of Operations. The author focuses on the American security interests in Finnish territories, as well as expert views on the US priority in Finland’s foreign policy, including the latest public opinion polls. The aim of US military reinforcement in Finland is twofold. First, to pose a threat to Russia. Second, to help the US military improve surveillance, intelligence and analysis capabilities in real time in north-west Europe and the North Atlantic. Within the context of challenges to Russia’s security, the major institutional arrangements, military trends and consequences of cooperation are discussed. Finally, scenarios for the development of Finnish-US relations within NATO are proposed.

State health departments are at the core of the United States (U.S.) public health infrastructure. Surveillance to monitor trends in disease and injury; the development, coordination, and delivery of services; and public education are some of the core functions health department employees oversee every day. As such, agencies and their employees are well positioned to inform policy decisions that affect the public’s health. However, little is known about the role of health department staff — a sizeable proportion of the public health workforce — as advocates for public health policies, independent of their agency roles. Anecdotally, some health department employees with whom we have spoken expressed reluctance to engage in policy advocacy for fear of violating little known or understood agency or state rules.

The United States, like other countries facing rising health care costs, is pursuing a commitment to interoperable electronic health records. Electronic records, it is thought, have the potential to reduce the risks of error, improve care coordination, monitor care quality, enable patients to participate more fully in care management, and provide the data needed for research and surveillance. Interoperable electronic health records on a national scale — the ideal of a national health information network (or NHIN) — seem likely to magnify these advantages. Thus, the recent economic stimulus package contains considerable funding for the development of “health information technology architecture that will support the nationwide electronic exchange and use of health information in a secure, private, and accurate manner.”

The increasingly psychological terrain of crime and disorder management has had a transformative impact upon the use of electronic monitoring technologies. Surveillance technologies such as electronic monitoring - EM, biometrics, and video surveillance have flourished in commercial environments that market the benefits of asocial technologies in managing disorderly behavior and which, despite often chimerical crime prevention promises, appeal to the ontologically insecure social imagination. The growth of EM in criminal justice has subsequently taken place despite, at best, equivocal evidence that it protects the public and reduces recidivism. Innovative developments in Portugal, Argentina and the United States have re-imagined EM technologies as more personalized devices that can support victims rather than control offenders. These developments represent a re-conceptualization of the use of the technology beyond the neoliberal prism of rational choice theories and offender-oriented thinking that influenced first generation thinking about EM. This paper identifies the socio-political influences that helped conceptualize first generation thinking about EM as, firstly, a community sentence and latterly, as a technique of urban security. The paper reviews attempts to theorize the role and function of EM surveillance technologies within and beyond criminal justice and explores the contribution of victimological perspectives to the use of EM 2.0.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the geopolitical and regional significance of the Sahara-Sahel zone (SSZ) of Africa in the current coordinate system of international relations, primarily taking into account the increased interest of Russia in this region in the last few years. An assessment of the economic potential of the SSZ is given to determine the feasibility of investments in the development of its countries, including from the point of view of their importance for the strategic and military-political interests of Russia and its main competitors there, primarily France and the United States. The prospect of maintaining Russia's active presence in the region and the cost of this is assessed. The reasons for the curtailment of the French military-political presence in the main countries of this region and the desire of the United States to maintain its intelligence surveillance bases there are explained. Conclusions and suggestions are made regarding what Russia needs to do to ensure its interests in the SSZ with minimal costs.

Context: In 2010, 8.6 million children were treated for unintentional injuries in American emergency departments. Child engagement in sports and recreation offers many health benefits but also exposure to injury risks. In this analysis, we consider possible developmental risk factors in a review of age, sex, and incidence of 39 sport and recreational injuries. Objective: To assess (1) how the incidence of 39 sport and recreational injuries changed through each year of child and adolescent development, ages 1 to 18 years, and (2) sex differences. Design Descriptive epidemiology study. Setting: Emergency department visits across the United States, as reported in the 2001–2008 National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database. Patients or Other Participants: Data represent population-wide emergency department visits in the United States. Main Outcome Measure(s) Pediatric sport- and recreation-related injuries requiring treatment in hospital emergency departments. Results: Almost 37 pediatric sport or recreational injuries are treated hourly in the United States. The incidence of sport- and recreation-related injuries peaks at widely different ages. Team-sport injuries tend to peak in the middle teen years, playground injuries peak in the early elementary ages and then drop off slowly, and bicycling injuries peak in the preteen years but are a common cause of injury throughout childhood and adolescence. Bowling injuries peaked at the earliest age (4 years), and injuries linked to camping and personal watercraft peaked at the oldest age (18 years). The 5 most common causes of sport and recreational injuries across development, in order, were basketball, football, bicycling, playgrounds, and soccer. Sex disparities were common in the incidence of pediatric sport and recreational injuries. Conclusions: Both biological and sociocultural factors likely influence the developmental aspects of pediatric sport and recreational injury risk. Biologically, changes in perception, cognition, and motor control might influence injury risk. Socioculturally, decisions must be made about which sport and recreational activities to engage in and how much risk taking occurs while engaging in those activities. Understanding the developmental aspects of injury data trends allows preventionists to target education at specific groups.

As humanity improves its use of technologies that can replace parts of a biological organism with ones containing mechanical or electronic components, it raises important legal and political issues. For example, the successful implantation of devices in human bodies could lead to the emergence of new cognitive and motor abilities, thereby resulting in the creation of a new class of people. Undoubtedly, this new class of people with extraordinary abilities would require a legal and governmental response. However, the question that arises is what legal rights might be given to these people, considering that they are more similar to machines than to men or women. The following legal aspects are of the utmost importance: the legal rights and responsibilities of cyborgs; the regulation of access to neuroprosthetic devices by third parties; and the limitation of the illegal use of the damaging capabilities of cyborgs. This article examines a number of laws and regulations from various jurisdictions in the United States, the European Union, South Korea and China that apply to cyborg technologies, with a particular focus on a legal doctrine that applies to neuroprostheses.

Purpose Cyberspace is a virtual environment where instantaneous communications are initiated and consumed using computer networks without any natural or artificial boundaries. These communications are not only an exchange of information but also a catharsis on the socio-political environment of the real world. This explosion of electronic expression is often detrimental to the traditional secretive maneuvers of nation states and the exercise of its power. Unable to come to terms with the new reality nation states through legislative action or otherwise attempt to assert its sovereignty in the space that has no political and societal boundaries. This may lead to an encroachment on basic human rights that often have constitutional guarantees in the real world but may be violated in the online milieu. This paper aims to investigate this issue in detail and evaluate whether nation states are using cyber-security as a propaganda tool to transgress on electronic expression. Design/methodology/approach The Website of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights states “In December 2013, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 68/167, which expresses deep concern at the negative impact that surveillance and interception of communications may have on human rights”. It further says “The General Assembly called on all States to review their procedures, practices and legislation related to communications surveillance, interception and collection of personal data and emphasized the need for States to ensure the full and effective implementation of their obligations under international human rights law”. With this development, this paper seeks to unravel the role of nation states in using cybersecurity as a propaganda tool by raising the specter of threat to national security and economic wellbeing. The paper is based on exploratory research with data compilation from secondary sources. To collect data, various research papers, books and journals have been referenced and data available in public domain has been accumulated. Findings This paper has tried to unravel state action on cyberspace which often runs counter to the concept of civil liberties. It indicates that in terms of both national security and economic impact, cybercrime represent a very nominal threat vector. Also, cybercrime as compared with other forms of crime is again nominal. Finally, cyber laws and policies of different countries need to be more nuanced such as to allow space for civil liberties. Overall, the propaganda surrounding the malaise of cybercrime seems to be more hype than real. We already have examples of countries who have transgressed into electronic expression in cyber space. Therefore, UN has a valid reason to raise a red flag on this unfolding issue. Originality/value This paper was published at 21st Americas Conference of Information Systems held at Puerto Rico, USA, between August 13-15, 2015 (AMCIS, 2015). The authors of this paper seek review by Editors of the Journal for Republication of original work. The authors have taken cognizance of the Originality Guidelines for Emerald published at this URL www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/authors/writing/originality.htm

The defeat of the U.S. client regime in Afghanistan and the seizure of power by the Taliban in August 2021 marked a real turning point. These events represented another major setback for the United States in the wake of a failed war in Iraq. Journalists rushed to compare the debacle in Kabul in 2021 to Saigon in 1975, as Afghans fearful of Taliban rule scrambled to get onto US planes. Many were left behind as the United States rushed to get its own forces and those of its allies out. The August 2021 regime collapse in Afghanistan, although sudden in its final manifestation, was a long time coming. The United States realized it had been defeated at least by 2020, as the Trump administration agreed to a total US withdrawal in direct negotiations with the Taliban. The Biden administration continued this policy, which had two basic aspects: the United States would withdraw by the end of August 2021, and the Taliban would not attack US forces during the period of withdrawal. Both sides kept to the bargain; the Afghan people were not consulted at all, nor was the US-backed government of Ashraf Ghani, who was not even included in the negotiations. There was an important difference from the situation in Saigon in 1975, however. The forces that defeated the United States in Vietnam included female combatants and officers. Moreover, the regime they installed to replace the US client state espoused a modernist, if authoritarian, ideology that extolled gender equality, land reform, and other forms of social and economic transformation. In contrast, the return to power of the Taliban was instead a setback for women’s rights of epochal proportions, and for other social and political rights as well. They set about establishing an ultra-conservative fundamentalist regime of a type not seen since the Islamic State was driven out of Raqqa, Syria, in 2017. The Taliban have again established a theocracy, which openly supports long-standing hierarchies of gender, ethnicity, religion, and class, albeit with a somewhat modern form of organization, including a surveillance apparatus and modern weapons. With its denial of secondary education to girls, the new Taliban regime’s level of gender apartheid far exceeds those of Saudi Arabia and Iran. At this writing, not a single country, not even Saudi Arabia, has formally recognized the Taliban government.

AbstractThis paper addresses attempts to locate and dislocate music audiences in the context of global commercial, legal, and technical developments. The 2001 legal decision against Napster in the United States found the file share service company guilty of copyright infringement. This precedent appeared to support the recording industry. However, such legal frames have been bypassed by new softwares. Supporters see such global networks of sharing and distribution as undoing corporate control. The recording industry has responded with parallel claims of having encryption and surveillance technologies capable of globally reregulating property. However, as this article shows, there is no technical necessity and that total freedom and total enforcement are impossible. Just as globalization is reified into an inevitable process of deregulation in one instance and at the next moment it is reified into an indispensable regulatory regime, so new electronic media and global electronic networks promote neither regulation or deregulation, except in so far as the balance of social forces at any one time interprets and enacts them in such ways.

The popularity of electronic cigarettes in the United States and around the world has led to a startling rise in youth nicotine use. The Juul® e-cigarette was introduced in the U.S. market in 2015 and had captured approximately 13% of the U.S. market by 2017. Unlike many other contemporary electronic cigarette companies, the founders behind the Juul® e-cigarette approached their product launch like a traditional high-tech start-up company, not like a tobacco company. This article presents a case study of Juul’s corporate and product development history in the context of US regulatory actions. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the value of government-curated archives as leading indicators which can (a) provide insight into emergent technologies and (b) inform emergent regulatory science research questions. A variety of sources were used to gather data about the Juul® e-cigarette and the corporations that surround it. Sources included government agencies, published academic literature, non-profit organizations, corporate and retail websites, and the popular press. Data were disambiguated, authenticated, and categorized prior to being placed on a timeline of events. A timeline of four significant milestones, nineteen corporate filings and events, twelve US regulatory actions, sixty-four patent applications, eighty-seven trademark applications, twenty-three design patents and thirty-two utility patents related to Juul Labs and its associates is presented, spanning the years 2004 through 2020. This work demonstrates the probative value of findings from patent, trademark, and SEC filing literature in establishing a premise for emergent regulatory science research questions which may not yet be supported by traditional archival research literature. The methods presented here can be used to identify key aspects of emerging technologies before products actually enter the market; this shifting policy formulation and problem identification from a paradigm of being reactive in favor of becoming proactive. Such a proactive approach may permit anticipatory regulatory science research and ultimately shorten the elapsed time between market technology innovation and regulatory response.

This article covers Russian-American relations during the presidency of Vladimir Putin and Joseph Biden. It seems that the worst (“bottom” and “freezing point”) in the development of bilateral relations, as well as the “witch hunt” in the United States (unidentified hackers who allegedly committed cyber attacks on state's and party's structures), was left behind. However, numerous (energy, monetary, diplomatic, cultural, and civilizational) crises have re-emerged between Russia and the United States. Only economic diplomacy and the political will of those who determine and implement the state course can solve them. Economic diplomacy presents today a certain interest and a scientific problem at the same time. The lack of a strictly scientific interpretation of economic diplomacy and the difference in the perception of its essence are explained by the different approaches of scientists to the goal-setting in the study. The most advanced direction in the methodology of political sciences was the epistemological and systematic approach to the description of economic diplomacy. This is largely facilitated by the study of economic diplomacy on the example of modern Russia and the United States - two world powers as centers of strength and influence, indicators of international life, and some kind of dependent antipodes in balancing economic policies in favor of America. The undeniable facts of our time show that trade or commercial diplomacy is only one type of economic diplomacy, among others; that the diplomacy of the dollar as a world currency is rapidly losing its former position in the attempts of the United States to launch the electronic world economy; that political decision-making on economic diplomacy must necessarily be in the realm of its theory and practice, and not in the field of economic policy and political economy (as the influence of domestic and world business on the country's policy and its state course, as well as the politicization of international economic relations, respectively). International life, world order, geopolitics, and the world economy today are in the forming stage of a new system of international relations and other mechanisms of coordinated interaction between the countries of the world. The scientific hypothesis of the article is related to the statement that economic diplomacy is an alternative to the obsolete model of liberal capitalism (with its crises, sanctions, the excessively long stagnation of the world economy, the decline of national economies, regional conflicts, epidemics, the pandemic, and all the ensuing consequences) and that the parallel development of the Western and Eastern systems of international relations in the future is possible. The article provides a comparative analysis of certain aspects of the 2021 national security strategies of the Russian Federation and the USA. The concept of the modern theory of economic diplomacy on the basis of its systemic nature was outlined, which was the main research issue.

The purpose of the article is to explore the circumstances surrounding the emergence of the concept of UN oversight operations as the initial form of peacekeeping operations and to clarify their role in peacekeeping through the work of such first groups as the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) and the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan. The methodology of the research based on the principles of systemicity, authenticity, historicism, logics. General scientific (analysis, synthesis, generalization) and special-historical (historical-typological, historical-system) methods have been used. The events are considered according to their interrelation and in the totality of the revealed historical facts. The scientific novelty is that for the first time the historical aspect of UN involvement in resolving regional conflicts of the second half of the twentieth was explored, since most of the works were written by professional lawyers, political scientists, etc., and thus, due to the specific nature of their research, historical aspects could not be covered in full. Conclusions. In the course of the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the United Nations has developed new methods of peacekeeping. In the late 1940-s – early 1950-s, the concept of UN oversight operations as the initial form of peacekeeping operations was developed by member-states. The creation of this concept gave a significant impetus to the development of UN peacekeeping. The function of the UN observers included: surveillance, daily reports, incident investigations, military installations inspection. Thus, they were the main source of information for the Security Council on the situation in the region. On May 29, 1948, a group of military observers called the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) to monitor the truce was created, which is considered was reference to the history of this crucial and necessary UN activity. In 1949, the United Nations Group on India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) formed. The experience of these first groups became the basis for developing other forms and methods of peacekeeping: missions to find out the facts, plebiscite observations, good-service missions, reconciliation teams, mediators and special representatives, and more. The author draws attention to the fact that regional conflicts mentioned in the article, despite the efforts of the UN, remain unresolved today, so the UN should develop more effective measures for their settlement.

This paper addresses the energy efficiency issue in household appliances, which has led to the establishment of policies at a global level in favor of setting minimum energy performance standards (MEPS), which guarantee end users are able to select more efficient equipment. The countries of the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and the Community of the European Union were taken as references to review their policies and implementation strategies, in order to be compared with the Colombian panorama (at the market, technical and political levels). This allows the establishment of common aspects and differences related to the determination of energy consumption, adjusted volume, and formalization of efficiency ranges, and in the specific case of domestic refrigeration. Managing to distinguish the most relevant aspects for the successful adoption of these policies in Colombia. It is evident that the implementation of these guidelines has a positive impact on the market of the countries and communities of reference. Similarly, the MEPS are shown as a mechanism to regulate energy consumption in the residential sector.

Through the United Nations, the international community is seriously paying attention to the use of seabed areas as regulated by the Law of the Sea Convention 1982, which states that the area and its resources are the common heritage of humankind. The 1994 Agreement has implemented chapter XI. The resources are relating to the state's interests in terms of energy exploration and environmental impact aspects. An increasing need for global electronic products by many countries in which of the components are rare minerals. Various minerals such as manganese, polymetallic nodules, and polymetallic sulphur are lying down in the seabed. However, seabed also had an essential role in keeping the marine ecosystem balanced. On the one hand, the human's need for those minerals also cannot be denied. Draft of regulations by the International Seabed Authority to manage deep-sea mining are still insufficient to prevent irrevocable damage to the marine ecosystem and loss of essentials species for the next. On the other hand, the spirit of Sustainable Development Goals 14 concerns life underwater. This paper examines deep-sea mining science from a legal perspective to protect and preserve seabed for the future generation using normative approach describing norms and principles in the Law of the Sea Convention 1982. As a result, the commercialisation of deep-sea mining violates the principle of the convention. Thus, it needs to encourage ISA to enhance the minimum requirements for all contracting parties in the future.

In this study the author indicates the main problems that appeared in Poland as a result of the opening of borders after the transition to a new economic and political system launched in 1989. The list is headed by offenses committed by foreign nationals, smuggling activities, illegal crossing of frontiers, and population movements, especially from very low-income countries. Border crime is defined here as both illegal border crossing, customs and currency offenses, forgery of documents and crime againts institutions. Border crime can be examined in a large numer of aspects as offenses which ere a threat to fundamental public policy interests. The crux of the matter lies in the motives and aims of the perpetrator. When we refer to border crime we have in mind the kind of offenses that are associated with cross-border movement of persons and objects involved in an illegal activity The commission of offenses falling into this category is not confined solely to border regions. The area of operations of criminals of this kind may be the whole of a country. Border crime is crime of a special kind. Its effects and in particular its further consequences are not always visible. Nor in all such cases is there an injured party, though it should be noted that serious harm may be suffered by people smuggled across borders and that injury is caused to victims of smuggling-related car theft. It is worth drawing attention to the etiology of this kind of crime. Among the internal influences contributing to its growth should be included the closure or collapse of workplaces, state farms and industrial enterprises, especially along Poland’s eastern border, and the consequent rise in unemployment. In recent years there has been a notable decline in the public’s standard of living, which has prompted some of them to seek alternative or additional sources of income.With increasing frequency people set their sights on swift multiplication of wealth and see in smuggling, for instance, a relatively simple and low-risk way of making money. It is worth noting a judicial tendency towards unduly lenient treatment of perperators of border crime and to hand down light sentences (most glaringly, for organizacion of illegal border crossing). Another development has been a steep rise in the incidence of pathological phenomena among officials, such as forgery or falsification of documents, bribery or entry into the structures of criminal groups. Much more dangerous are the external factors driving border crime, such as steadily worsening economic decline in parts o fthe Middle East, Asia and the former Soviet Union and rising unemployment and inflation in the countries concerned. Other causes are wars, national, ethnic and religious conflicts and the inadequacy of the technical protection of frontiers. Not without significance is the continuing demand in the East for cars of Western make and the possibility of legalizing their acquisition if they have been stolen. There has also been an intensification of corrupt practices among public officials with an influence on the state of national security and inviolability of frontiers (especially among the border guard forces in Belarus and Ukraine). Also conducive to the growth of crime is the further organization and specialization of criminal groups pursuing activities on both sides of the frontier. The author also offers a detailed picture of selected types of border crime. Her study centers on the legal and criminological aspects of the crime of illegal entry. She indicates the methods of committing this crime employed by its perpetrators at both border crossings and along smuggling routes. She depicts the mechanisms involved in the smuggling of persons with particular emphasis on the role played in such trafficking by organized criminal groups. Another criminal activity worth attention is smuggling, chiefly of liquor, cigarettes, cars, drugs, animals, guns, etc. This crime is a threat to the economic interests of the state which incurs significant losses of revenue in this respect. The author brings out the complex, underground modus operandi of the criminals involved and stresses the prominence in this illicit activity of organized criminal groups. The data illustrating border crime points to the continued persistence of threats from illegal immigration into Poland, including in many cases in organized forms, and its transformation from a transit to a destination country. Because of the unabating demand in the former Soviet republics for Western cars rhe organizers of smuggling rings will probably develop more sophisticated methods of falsifying the documents of cars (mostly luxury models) stolen in West-European countries. As at present there will be continued smuggling, both by individuals and in organized forms (of considerable value per consignment), of liquor into Poland and of cigarettes bound for Poland and Germany. Intensification of attempts to corrupt the personnel (including senior officers) of watchtowers and border crossings. The most important role in prevention and suppression of border crime is played by Border Guard personnel. More and more often they are equipped with modern equipment for X-raying baggage and carry out passport checks by means of readers connected to a computer database. Border Guard personel also engage in operations outside the border zone and conduct searches of dwellings and premises belonging to the organizers of illegal cross-border traffic. Not infrequently they face an increased element of risk. Criminals often possess firearms, gas and other dangerous implements. Hence the importance of specialist training, physical fitness, unarmed combat skills and the ability to handle weapons. An important erement in fighting border crime is cooperation with other public institutions. Preventive action and operational, surveillance and investigative measures aimed at improving the state of security and public order and detection and expulsion of foreign nationals who have entered Poland illegally are carried out in the border zone in collaboration with the police. Because of the nature or its responsibilities and the international connections of criminal groups the Border Guard maintains day-to-day liaison with its counterparts in other countries. Among the most important areas of cooperation between the border authorities of European Union members, Central and East European countries, the United States and Canada are interchange of information about tasks, structures, jurisdictions, powers and problems relating to cross-border traffic and border crime and interaction in operational and investigative activities. There is a particularly successful record of cooperarion with the German authorities (specifically the BGS). It is worth stressing that amendmends to the Border Guard Act adopted in 2001 provide for its equipment with additional powers for combating corruption, including operational oversight, „sting” operations, the offering or acceptance of bribes, and imposes on Border Guard personnel and employees the requirement to file declarations of assets. The powers in question could be a significant boost to the prevention and suppression of border crime.

Many aspects of war and national defense appear to run in cycles. Indeed, the identification and explanation of these cycles is a favorite pastime of military scholars. Historians and political scientists characterize war as alternating cycles of offensive and defensive dominance. The idea of cyclicality may in fact be hardwired into academic discussions and understandings of war. For example, early war theorist Carl von Clausewitz described an ever-changing character of war undergirded by war’s fundamentally unchanging nature. Because the dominant theoretical understanding of war is that it holds a mixture of both fixed and constantly evolving elements, our concept of war may inherently lend itself to the idea of cycles. At the same time, however, the identification of cycles in war and national defense can be seen empirically. For example, the United States defense budget since World War II is notoriously cyclical, running through peaks and troughs in constant dollar terms roughly every fifteen to twenty years. Since peak defense funding periods do not always align with periods of war, it is not the dynamics of war alone that drive cyclical United States defense budgets but a mix of phenomena that includes economic cycles. Hence, in noting the cyclical nature of many aspects of defense, historians must further investigate to determine what dynamics and constraints may be at play in driving the cycle. While commercial technology continues as a driver of acquisition speed, especially for IT; the decentralization of acquisition decision- making and the delegation of decision authority to the military de- partments will likely encourage different priority balances to emerge in different sectors of the acquisition system. The delegation of acquisition authority to the United States Army has resulted in a significant internal reorganization of its acquisition functions. The Army is, for the first time, establishing a command focused on bringing together the wide variety of acquisition stake- holders in one structure, the Army Futures Command. Army Futures Command will bring the system for deciding requirements for new capabilities together with the acquisition process. In effect, the Army consolidates acquisition responsibilities within the service more closely under the control of the Army Chief of Staff, to whom the commander of Army Futures Command will report. The Army Futures Command will pursue a new modernization strategy, built around six major priorities, and hopes to significantly accelerate the delivery of new capability. By centralizing responsibility for requirements setting and acquisition execution in one command, the Army hopes to reduce the friction (and timespan) of coordinating across the Army’s multiple major communities. By contrast, the United States Air Force plans to extend its delegation of acquisition authority from OSD by redelegating this authority down to program executive officers and empowering program managers. This redelegation may reflect the relative maturity of the Air Force’s major programs, such as the KC-46 tanker and the B-21 bomber, where the high level strategic issues are decided (notably in both cases with cost control as the major priority), and the focus is on program execution. Matters of program execution are often best handled at the program level or as close to it as possible. However, less mature parts of the Air Force acquisition portfolio, such as recent efforts to design new systems for command and control and systems de- signed to approach space as a warfighting domain, may use the same decentralized authority to achieve different objectives. Notably, Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper is using the prototyping authority granted by Congress to rapidly demonstrate critical high-performance technologies, such as hypersonic strike systems called for in the National Defense Strategy. Decentralizing and distributing acquisition authority within military departments may lead to a variety of microcosms within the acquisition system where the balance of acquisition priorities is different. Other trends, however, will impact the acquisition system across its entire scope. Another major trend is the increasing functionality of weapon systems defined by software over hardware. The capability seen in the Air Force’s flight lines, in the Army’s motor pools, or in the Navy’s homeports is increasingly determined by lines of code rather than steel and aluminum. This trend has major implications for the acquisition system because it presents challenges to its basic structure, which was originally de- signed around an industrial production model. Software-defined systems break down the boundaries around which many organizations and processes are organized. Software-based systems don’t graduate from development to production to sustainment like hardware-based systems, presenting challenges to government budgeting mechanisms that are leading to calls for new funding categories that can deal with the iterative nature of software development and production. Consider the idea that a system which can send and receive electrons may serve many purposes, such as a communications device, a sensor, a weapon, and an electronic defense system. Software-based capabilities are steadily spreading, and they are a powerful reason why Under Secretary of Defense Ellen Lord appointed a special assistant, Jeff Boleng, for software acquisition. Boleng will “help oversee the development of software development policies and standards across DoD and offer advice on commercial software development best practices to Pentagon leadership . . . .” Perhaps the perfect embodiment of this trend towards software-driven capabilities is in artificial intelligence. How this trend will affect the balance of acquisition priorities in the future is difficult to predict, but one thing seems likely: change will remain dynamic rather than static, leading to continuous acquisition reform cycles for the years to come.

Abstract Introductory sentence indicating purpose of the study: Over the last three decades, incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) has risen steadily among people younger than age 50 (early-onset) in many developed countries, including the United States. More information is needed about the causes of early-onset CRC and novel, pragmatic interventions are needed to ensure rapid identification of early-onset CRC cases through timely screening and symptoms detection. Brief description of pertinent experimental procedures: The Consortium for Research on Early-Onset Colorectal Cancer (CREO) is a partnership among scientists and clinicians at four data-contributing health systems: Kaiser Permanente Northwest, Kaiser Permanente Northern California, and Kaiser Permanente Colorado, and Henry Ford Health. CREO plans to assemble a novel cohort of 8 million adults (including 3,200 early-onset CRC cases diagnosed from 2010 through 2025) encompassing electronic health record, survey, and biospecimen data to conduct research that will identify and estimate the impact of approaches to rapidly detect early-onset CRC through screening and clinical practice. Using electronic health record data from our participating health systems, we identified individuals diagnosed with CRC between 2010 and 2020. Here, we describe demographic and tumor characteristics of individuals with CRC in this cohort, and compare those to national data obtained from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End-Results program for the years 2012 – 2016. Summary of the new, unpublished data: We identified 15,884 adults with CRC (1,932 with early-onset CRC and 13,912 with late-onset CRC) in the four participating CREO health systems. Individuals with early-onset CRC in the CREO cohort were non-Hispanic White (54%), Hispanic (18%), Asian-American (14%), and African American/Black (9%). The proportion of CREO cohort adults with early-onset CRC was 12%; this matched the proportion in the population-based SEER data. The proportion of diagnosed CRC cases located in the rectum was 29% in both the CREO cohort and in SEER data. Anatomic location for the remaining tumors varied slightly between the CREO cohort and SEER data: in CREO data, 22% were proximal colon cancers, and 31% were distal colon cancers; in SEER data, and 29% were proximal and 22% were distal. Statement of the conclusions: Our findings show that CREO’s assembled cohort of electronic health record data from multiple large health systems matches several key aspects of population-based data from SEER. Through CREO, we plan to create a comprehensive, multi-level dataset of a new, racially and ethnically diverse cohort of 8 million adults in order to elucidate factors associated with the alarming rise in early-onset CRC and identify interventions to ensure rapid identification and secondary prevention of early-onset CRC. Citation Format: Gloria D. Coronado, Andrea Burnett-Hartman, Jeffrey Lee, Carmit McMullen, Carolyn Rutter, Mary Ann McBurnie, Christine Neslund-Dudas, John Carethers. Building a data resource to advance research on early-onset colorectal cancer: The consortium for research on early-onset colorectal cancer (CREO) [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference on Colorectal Cancer; 2022 Oct 1-4; Portland, OR. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(23 Suppl_1):Abstract nr A011.

Introduction: Venous thromboembolism (VTE), defined as deep vein thrombosis (DVT), pulmonary embolism (PE), or both, represents a major cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with cancer. VTE is the second leading cause of death in patients with cancer, after cancer itself, in the United States. Previous studies have suggested differences by race in the occurrence of VTE among cancer patients. The purpose of this study was to investigate clinical differences in black and white patients with VTE and cancer. Methods: We conducted an analysis of a CDC/Duke VTE surveillance project at the three hospitals in Durham County, North Carolina (Duke University Hospital, Duke Regional Hospital and the Durham VA Medical Center) from April 2012 through March 2014. A combination of electronic and manual review methods were used to identify unique Durham County residents with new diagnoses of objectively confirmed VTE. Data abstracted included demographics, risk factors including cancer, clinical data, treatment, and outcomes. Results: A total of 1028 patients with a new VTE were identified during the surveillance period. Twenty-seven patients who were not black or white (e.g., race not listed; Asian; etc), and 41 with VTE affecting areas other than PE or limb DVT (e.g., cerebral sinus venous thrombosis) were excluded from this analysis. Of the remaining 960 patients, slightly more than half were female (497/960=51.8%), more than half were black (508/960=52.9%), almost a third were obese (337/960 = 35.1%), and median age was 59 years old. At the time of their VTE diagnosis, 184 patients with VTE (19.2%) had active cancer, defined as metastatic or diagnosed within the previous 6 months. The proportion of VTE associated with cancer varied by race. Among the 508 black patients with VTE, 111 (21.9%) had active cancer; in comparison, among the 452 white patients with VTE, 73 (16.1%) had active cancer (p-value=0.025). Black patients with VTE and cancer were older, had a lower body mass index (BMI), and were less likely to have sustained a prior VTE compared to black patients with VTE who did not have cancer (Table 1). Similarly, white patients with VTE and cancer had a lower BMI than white patients without cancer (Table 1). However, in contrast to the findings for black patients, white patients with VTE and cancer were not significantly older and did not show differences in having a prior VTE than white patients with VTE who did not have cancer. Additionally, white patients with VTE and cancer were much more likely to have sustained a PE, with or without DVT, and less likely to have sustained a DVT alone, than white patients with VTE who did not have cancer (Table 1). Black and white patients with both VTE and cancer, were similar in several aspects; however, white patients were less likely to have sustained a DVT alone and more likely to have sustained a PE, with or without DVT, compared to black patients. The types of cancer most frequently encountered in black patients with VTE were gastrointestinal (24.3%), genitourinary (23.4%), and lung (18.9%), followed by breast (8.1%), gynecologic (9.0%) and hematologic malignancies (9.9%). The types of cancer most frequently encountered in white patients with VTE were lung (27.4%), breast (16.4%), and gastrointestinal (13.7%), followed by genitourinary (9.6%), gynecologic (8.2%) and hematologic malignancies (6.8%). Black and white patients with VTE and cancer were treated similarly to black and white patients with VTE who did not have cancer, with most receiving anticoagulant therapy and fewer than 10% receiving an IVC filter (Table 1). Enoxaparin was used most frequently, followed by warfarin. Conclusions: There are several notable demographic and clinical differences between patients with VTE with and without cancer. While differences were observed for both black and white patients, several factors that were variable according to cancer status were unique to either black patients or white patients. One notable difference between black and white patients with both VTE and cancer was a lower proportion of DVT only and a higher proportion of PE, with or without DVT, in white patients. Disclosures Ortel: Instrumentation Laboratories: Consultancy.

INTRODUCTION. The Arctic is a unique marine and terrestrial ecosystem. However, the Arctic region is currently experiencing enormous environmental stress. This is due to the following factors. The first factor is the ongoing climate change on the planet as a whole, which is most clearly seen in the Arctic. Researchers claim that some species of flora and fauna are threatened with extinction. For example, the polar bear, the largest specie in the Arctic trophic chain, is currently experiencing great difficulties in finding food due to the abundant melting of glaciers and, as a result, the reduction of its habitat. Global warming is also causing changes in habitats and migration routes not only for Arctic species, but also for other species that have never climbed so high to the north. Nowadays, local fishermen sometimes catch species of fish that have never been seen in Arctic waters before. Cases of Pacific salmon entering the Atlantic Ocean through the Arctic seas have also been recorded. There is another problem related to the climate factor. For many years, a huge amount of toxic waste has been stored in the Arctic coastal areas. Due to the melting of permafrost, pollutants enter the marine ecosystem, accumulate in marine biota and as a result end up on our table. The second factor is the increased anthropogenic impact due to both climate change and the Arctic political strategies of several states at once. The development of the Northern Sea Route (NSR), the increase in the intensity of navigation, exploration and extraction of natural resources, construction of infrastructure facilities and other human activities have a negative impact on the environment. The Arctic ecosystem is facing an increase in production and consumption waste [Kallenborn, Brorstrom-Lunden, Reiersen, Wilson 2018:33001; Jaskolski, Pawlowski, Strzelecki, Zagorski, Lane 2018:2011], noise [Quijano, Hannay, Austin 2019:1228; Stevenson, Davies, Huntington, Sheard 2019:83; Kyhn, Sveegaard, Tougaard 2014:424], light [Ludvigsen, Berge, Geoffroy, Cohen, De La Torre, Nornes, Singh, Sorensen, Daase, Johnsen 2018; Bennie, Duffy, Davies, Correa-Cano, Gaston 2015:2715], vibration, temperature, chemical and biological pollution. The risk of man-made accidents and catastrophes increases, which can lead to even more dangerous consequences.MATERIALS AND METHODS. We have studied and analyzed international agreements and other documents on the protection of the Arctic marine environment. The texts of these documents were taken for analysis on the official pages on the Internet. Such resources include, for example, the official website of the United Nations Organization (UN), the International Maritime Organization (IMO), etc. Work with Russian legal acts included access to such portals as the official website of the Government of the Russian Federation, the Administration of the Northern Sea Route, the ConsultantPlus Legal Reference System, etc. The international documents were divided into groups, which are presented in a separate table. This made it possible to structure the work, avoid long lists in the text and focus on the most important aspects of the topic under consideration. The research is also based on published works of experts in the field of International law, law of the sea, environmental law, political science, environmental science and other fields of knowledge. Web of Science (webofknowledge. com), Russian scientific electronic library (elibrary. ru), Researchgate (researchgate.net) and other systems became the resources for working with literature. The author also studied law enforcement practice, trends in the development of scientific research in the region, as well as some political processes that are somehow related to the modern legal regulation of marine environment protection in the Arctic. The term “Arctic states” is used in this article as it is given in the [Vylegzhanin 2013]. The term “coastal States” is used in this article as it is given in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.RESEARCH RESULTS. As a result of ongoing climate changes on the planet, as well as due to increased anthropogenic pressure on the region, the fragile ecosystem of the Arctic is currently subject to various types of pollution (noise, vibration, light, radioactive, various types of waste, etc.) and degradation. Both scientists and politicians pay attention to this. We have analyzed the existing international and national norms, regulating relations for the protection of the Arctic marine environment. For these purposes, international documents, depending on the range of regulated issues, were divided into five groups: 1) general; 2) special; 3) agreements regulating liability and compensation issues; 4) environmental agreements that indirectly regulate the protection of the marine environment; 5) Arctic documents. It is determined that the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (hereinaſter referred to as the Convention of 1982) is one of the main “general” agreements, which not only establishes the obligations of participating countries to protect the marine environment, but also provides coastal states with special environmental requirements in ice–covered areas, including the Arctic Ocean. In this regard, the Russian Federation has undertaken an obligation to regulate navigation in the waters of the Northern Sea Route (hereinaſter – the NSR) for the purposes of environmental protection and prevention of pollution from ships.The issue of the need to develop and sign a separate agreement on the Arctic was also considered by the author, and the conclusion was formulated that there is no need and objective possibility of implementing such an initiative, especially in the current political situation in the world. The author notes that all specialized international Arctic documents have an ecocentric focus, which meets the intentions of the Arctic states, including Russia, to continue the development and development of Arctic territories and waters with mandatory compliance with modern environmental requirements. In this regard, the development of scientific research in the Arctic and the improvement of the best existing environmental technologies are of particular importance. The 2017 Agreement on Strengthening International Arctic Scientific Cooperation is designed to promote the development of joint research and information exchange. However, in light of the suspension of scientific and technical cooperation between the Russian Federation and other Arctic states, we cannot consider its effectiveness today.DISCUSSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. There is a large number of documents regulating the protection of the Arctic marine environment, which have been developed at the international level. The Arctic ecosystem needs special protection because of its vulnerability. The ongoing climate change and melting of glaciers have led to an increase in anthropogenic pressure on the region. At the same time, it is known that any human activity has a negative impact on the state of the environment. Despite the existence of a large number of international and national documents on the protection of the Arctic marine environment, many issues have not yet been resolved. Today we face the need to fill in the existing gaps. However, the development of regulatory documents should be based on the results of scientific research in various fields of knowledge. This will ensure the validity of the decisions made. The Arctic is subject to international regulation, and the fragile Arctic environment is also protected internationally. The Arctic region differs from the Antarctic: the Antarctic Treaty effectively freezes territorial claims to the South Pole and allows states to protect the environment. The land part of the Arctic belongs to eight Arctic states. Therefore, international cooperation in the Arctic region faces many challenges, and the norms of nternational law, such as the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, are necessary to resolve emerging disputes.

This special issue entitled “Towards a better understanding of aggression and other related concepts” is a product of the XXXVII CICA International Conference co-organized by two Polish universities: Kazimierz Wielki University of Bydgoszcz and the University of Zielona Góra. It took place from the 22 to the 25 June, 2014 and was attended by about 100 participants from 16 countries [1]. The aim of the Conference was to study the phenomena of aggression and conflict resolution using a comprehensive, integrated and interdisciplinary approach which takes into account both biological and psycho-socio-cultural factors. Several communications dealing with emotions, including anger and fear, and others with behaviors such as aggression, violence and terrorism, have been selected for this issue. A Southafrican practitioner, Tina Lindhard, specialized in transpersonal psychology, suggests that maybe it is time we start studying emotions including anger and fear from "the inside out" by including phenomenology as a method to throw more light on how we experience these states in or through our bodies. Furthermore, she presents the "Living Matrix" model, which owes its origin to Quantum Mechanics and Electronic Biology, as a new complementary way of understanding how the living organism functions [2]. The Italian scholar Dr. Pagani stresses the complexity of violence, presented as a macrosystem of networks and of agents linked and interacting at different interconnected levels. She points out to the difficulty of defining violence, referring it not only to the explorations of the connections between systems taken from different research fields, but also to the theoretical premises and to the aims of the research. She argues that this “holistic” approach could allow a deeper understanding of violence and could lead towards more innovative and effective solutions to the problem of violence itself [3]. Dr. Ramirez, who has dedicated several decades of his research to the analysis of the justification of aggression from a cross-cultural approach across four continents, evaluates the applicability of a specific test (CAMA) in a new cultural context, assessing the structural equivalence of the data obtained in two different German age cohorts with the data previously investigated across the other cultures. Some adaptations concerning the assessment and theoretical models of the justification of aggressive actions in the German cultural context are being discussed [4]. Two academic colleagues from the University of Zielona Góra, Dr. Farnicka & Dr. Grzegorzewska, focus on some more practical aspects of aggression research, if we may say that, leading towards its prevention or therapy in children and adolescents. These Polish psychologists identify and analyse the family determinants for undertaking the aggressor or victim role. The results of their study reveal a number of determinants for people involved in perpetration or victimization, such as the type of relationship with parents (secure or insecure pattern), personal experience of being in the victim or aggressor role, and the level of hostility [5]. Finally, the first president of the Society for Terrorism Research, Dr. LoCicero, recounts some concerns raised by American psychologists, both earlier, in the years following September 11, 2001 (9/11), and more recent changes in the US policy, leading towards the risk for the USA of becoming a police state. According to her paper, engaging in open discussion about the failings of the American policy, the sometimes legitimate grievances of terrorist groups, and the draw of violence as a solution, is likely to put sincere and innocent adults at risk of becoming targets of intensive surveillance and suspicion [6]. It is thus clear that the discussion on aggression and other related concepts is here carried out from various scientific perspectives, which include traditional experimental psychology with a special focus on the role of family relationships and cultural factors, social and political psychology with a special focus on the role of State policies, and other theoretical perspectives which try to integrate their psychological framework with contributions from western and eastern philosophy, the neurosciences, biology, quantum physics, and complexity theory.

AbstractIn the summer of 2020, shocking headlines reverberated across global media outlets, revealing harrowing stories of forced sterilizations and reproductive abuses committed against Uighurs in China and immigrant women in the United States. The simultaneity of these events sheds light on essential aspects of a transnational order characterized by mass surveillance and detention, a defining feature of diverse contemporary political regimes. This article explores how reproductive violence intertwines with systems of detention and mass surveillance through these two cases. I do so by weaving together the decolonial feminist framework of body‐territory and the principles of reproductive justice that allow for a nuanced examination of how the control of the reproductive lives of Uighur and immigrant women reinforce the mechanisms of exclusion and surveillance embedded in state infrastructures. The demand for the right to bear children and to parent them under dignified conditions, free from violence, is increasingly pressing in a world where reproduction has become an instrument of surveillance and containment. This article engages in an ethnographic exploration of electronic paper trails, adopting what Geiger and Ribes aptly termed “trace ethnography.”

Abstract There is a broad consensus that global electronic commerce needs the World Trade Organization (WTO) trade rules to govern it. The current mandate of the WTO is merely to examine the various trade-related aspects of e-commerce. Nevertheless, in recent years, some WTO members have put forward a proposal to begin negotiations for global e-commerce rules which was impeded due to the differing positions of developed and developing members. This paper examines the positions of the United States, the European Union, Japan, and China on the e-commerce multilateral rules negotiation issues. It then takes a look at the prospect of the WTO being able to reach an agreement on e-commerce. The analysis shows that the United States and the European Union have varying views on consumer privacy, information protection, and internet taxation. Although Japan sides with the United States on these issues and China is on the same page as the European Union regarding consumer privacy, China holds a different position from the United States and the European Union on the other two matters. China is not making commitments on data localization, free data flow, and forced transfer of source codes. Therefore, the outlook of the current e-commerce talks is not favorable for concluding WTO e-commerce agreements.

Over the past fifty years, developed countries have undergone significant changes in their approaches to planning and managing the development of local communities. The main directions of this evolution include changing the levels of responsibility for the development of territories, modernizing management methodology, and intensifying inter-municipal cooperation. In these conditions, local governments should master modern approaches to economic development of communities, using information technology to ensure competitiveness. The author focuses on the key aspects of digital transformation in public administration, considering the experience of countries such as France, the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Singapore. In France, a special place is occupied by the use of a reliable government messenger Tchap, which ensures the confidentiality and security of civil servants' data. The United States has introduced the Open Meeting concept, which promotes e-democracy and the use of big data for city management, particularly in emergency situations. Singapore has developed six virtual research centers to improve technological capabilities. Israel has developed a national digitalization index that helps measure the availability and effectiveness of local municipalities' digital services, and the Netherlands has introduced a system of electronic interaction between the state and citizens, enabling electronic participation in government activities. The United Kingdom, through its «e-Citizens, e-Business, e-Government» strategy, has become a leader in providing electronic public services, which has increased the efficiency and effectiveness of government agencies. The study showed that the digital transformation of public administration covers not only the processes of providing administrative services, but also uses modern technologies to develop public policy. This includes planning, monitoring, and evaluating the performance of public authorities. The success of such transformations depends on political will, entrepreneurial initiative, and the creation of a favorable business climate.

Abstract Purpose The purpose of the study was to assess incidence and severity of hospital reported injuries related to law enforcement Use of Force (UoF) in the US over time, and by race. Methods Data from the National Emergency Department Sample from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project and the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS-AIP) from US Consumer Product Safety Commission were queried to identify UoF injuries. Regression analysis, t-tests, and chi-square tests were used in the analysis. Results Between 2006-15, there were 529,259 emergency department admissions for UoF injury in the NEDS, and 870,779 admissions in the NEISS-AIP. In a model adjusting for year, sex, and age, the Injury Severity Score increased by 1.1% annually (p<0.0001). Black people were 6 times as likely to be admitted to the ED as White people or Native Americans/Alaska Natives, and 25 times as likely as Asians/Pacific Islanders. Black patients were 4 times as likely as White patients to be admitted as inpatients. Per arrest rate by race using FBI uniform crime reporting data, Black arrestees were 2.5-3.1 times as likely as any other race to be hospitalized for UoF injury. Conclusion The results of the study demonstrate that US law enforcement are injuring civilians more frequently and severely over time, and that Black people are disproportionately affected.

Abstract At the early stage of humankind’s Space Age, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America showed an inclination to non-militarize outer space, but distrust also prompted them to carry out a series of high-altitude nuclear tests. In the end, while the non-militarization aspiration materialized on celestial bodies, in the outer void space between them only Weapons of Mass Destruction were prohibited. The last few decades have witnessed the incremental militarization of the Earth orbits. The initial phase of militarization, primarily for surveillance and early warning, was conducive to international peace and security. It is in the next phase, when space systems were integrated into warfighting capabilities and Ballistic Missile Defense systems, that outer space embarked on its reduction into a domain of conflicts. This trend was subtle in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, and didn’t become clear until the new millennium when new space powers emerged. Today, space-based weapons and terrestrial Anti-Satellite Weapons (ASATs) form the primary security concerns for space powers, depending on their relative space capability. The disparity is difficult to reconcile, putting space arms control literally on a halt. As States with counter-space capability are also highly reliant on space, there is a growing voluntary moratorium against the test and use of debris-generating ASATs and conflicts in space are likely to take an electronic and/or cyber form. The recent rise of the strategy of “deterrence and superiority” in space, however, may distract from the formation of this voluntary moratorium, aggravate an arms race in outer space, and even increase the risk of a full-scale conflict in space.

The multiracial population is considered the fasted growing population in the United States. In 2020, the percentage of people who reported multiples races changed more than all of the single race groups, increasing from 2.9% of the population (9 million people) in 2010 to 10.2% of the population (33.8 million) in 2020. Each multiracial subgroup has unique social and political histories that may lead to distinct social perceptions, economic situations, and health outcomes. We hypothesized that there is a multiracial distinction in the prevalence of obesity. On average multiracial respondents will have better or worse than both single-race component groups. We assessed whether the patterns of obesity of adults who identify as multiracial are distinctive from that of adults who identify a single-race identity, by using a three-year (2010-2012) pooled sample of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). We further investigate whether the prevalence of obesity in multiracial versus single-race individuals differ among Hispanic and non-Hispanic subgroups. Results show that categorizing all multiracial individuals into one group masks the different patterns of obesity within multiracial individuals. White-Black, White-Asian, White-Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (NHPI), and White-American Indian adults have a prevalence of obesity in between their single-race counterparts (Figure 1, Panel A). Among Hispanics, the prevalence of obesity in White-Black and Black-America Indian adults is lower than the same categories among non-Hispanics (Figure 1, Panel B). Whereas the prevalence of obesity in White-NHPII and Asian NHPI is higher than the same categories among non-Hispanics. This study helps us address aspects of the social construction of race and the complexity in evaluation of obesity prevalence. Findings raise further questions about the usage of a homogenous multiple race categorization in national surveys.

Electronic health information sharing and regional health information centres The practise of emergency medicine in the United States can have a significant impact. Regional Health Information Institutes are stakeholder networks that share local or regional information in a specific geographic area. Set up electronic data transfer. Safety of medical care and to improve efficiency across the country regional health information institutions are being created; Public health initiatives, biological surveillance and enhancing the reaction of catastrophe management; and identifying for research enormous databases of aggregate data. However, the economy Organizational issues and including geography to facilitate exchange With the Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) model They identified challenges. Direct, institutional HIE and such as seller-mediated exchange versus alternative modes of exchange RHIOs vary. Due to political and economic reasons HIE is a difficult task. It is of many types Classified by optional activities; they are for alternatives in judgments The differences between Used to allocate. Under conventional criterion priority functions Using PROMETHEE Choice of health information exchange. This paper proposes that in the final option to check the effect of different optional functions Comparable results are presented. Seven economic and environmental criteria, Four health information and Five decision makers health information exchange problem Major Structures. with decision makers using a five-point Likert scale by personal communication Data was collected. Under the usual criterion function PROMETHEE's algorithm is implemented. The pharmaceutical industry and research, medical trials, healthcare fraud detection, neurological research, and electronic health records are alternatives. Evaluation Parameters are Transparent, Autonomy, Open Source, Anonymity and Decentralized. Health Information Exchange using PROMETHEE. Electronic Health Records, is got third rank, Clinical Research is got first rank, Medical Fraud Detection is got forth rank, Neuroscience Research is got fifth rank and Pharmaceutical Industry and Research is got second rank

ObjectiveWe assesed the feasibility of a zoonotic disease surveillance system through the current EHR (ROVR) for all POAs and GOAs. Additionally, we conducted a retrospective observational study querying and collecting reported zoonoses of interest, for 2017.IntroductionDogs, cats and other companion animals have played an integral role in many aspects of human life. Human and companion animal (CAs) interactions have a wide range of benefits to human health1–3. The threat of zoonotic transmission between CAs and humans is exacerbated by proximity (56% of dog owners and 62% of cat owners sleep with their animal next to them4) and the number of diseases CAs share with humans. Many of these highlighted zoonoses are spread by direct contact, and others are vector-transmitted (e.g., fleas, ticks, flies, and mosquitos). Within the realm of the One-Health concept, CAs can serve multiple roles in zoonotic transmission chains between humans and animals. They can serve as intermediate hosts between wildlife reservoirs and humans, or as possible sentinel or proxy species for emerging diseases5. Given the large number of CAs within the United States (estimated 72 million pet dogs, 81 million pet cats), understanding and preventing the diseases prevalent in CA populations is of utmost importance.Biosurveillance is a critical component of One Health initiatives including zoonotic disease mitigation and control. As Lead Service for Veterinary Animal and Public Health Services, the Army has a responsibility to champion biosurveillance efforts to support One Health initiatives, improving Servicemember, family, and retiree health across the Joint Force. Additionally, with military personnel experiencing apparent increased rates of job-reducing ailments such as diarrheal, bacterial and viral disease6–8, it is essential that the Army focus on maximizing their operational potential by minimizing the amount of time personnel are sick from these transmissible diseases and observing potential sources of infection. By observing the zoonotic disease burden in privately owned (POAs) and government-owned (GOAs) animals, public health investigators can increase focus on what transmittable diseases are at greatest risk of being spread from companion animals to military personnel.To address this potential source of infection, the Department of Defense (DoD) sought and continues to seek to establish a centralized and integrated veterinary zoonotic surveillance system to provide Commanders with a clear picture of disease burden9. With this assigned responsibility, the Army Veterinary Service (VS) seeks to centralize and enhance surveillance efforts through the Remote Online Veterinary Record (ROVR) Electronic Health Record (EHR), an enterprise web-based application to support the Army VS, accurately establishing a zoonotic epidemiological baseline and sustaining consistent future reporting.MethodsThrough a requested effort and proof of concept, the Army Public Health Center’s (APHC) One Health Division tested the feasibility of a zoonotic disease surveillance system through the current EHR (ROVR) for all POAs and GOAs. We obtained one year (2017) worth of zoonotic encounters of interest through ROVR, querying a population of roughly 202,000 animals (n=202,217). We conducted a retrospective observational study comparing reported zoonoses of interest between CA populations. Maximum Likelihood Estimations of frequency detailed comparisons of frequency and prevalence between GOAs and POAs, within the ROVR EHR. Additionally, we evaluated the accuracy of surveillance data queried, proposed potential metrics and dashboards for commanders and stakeholders to easily observe zoonotic burden of companion animals and developed potential courses of action for future tools, collaborations, and educational interventions.ResultsOf the 512 collected zoonotic encounters, Giardia and Hookworm were the two most prevalent zoonoses overall, with 4.23 and 5.43 cases per 10,000 outpatient visits (OPVs), respectively. We observed a significant differential frequency of Giardia and Hookworm between GOAs and POAs (63% (CI: 54.6-71.4) vs 12.7% (CI: 9.7-16.1) and 2.5% (CI: 0.1-5.9) vs 41.9% (CI: 37.1-46.8) of all queried zoonotic diseases of interest, respectively). In addition to back-end database and querying improvements, we suggested the development of an educational intervention based at Army First-Year Graduate Veterinary Education program (FYGVE) locations to emphasize the important benefits of capturing zoonotic diseases of interest correctly, early stages in the clinical experience. The intervention would focus on increasing accurate data capture with the ultimate goal of a phased regional rollout through education and collaboartive buy-in.ConclusionsFrom these results and recent CDC guidance of data-driven surveillance, we’ve proposed a phased surveillance development plan focused on systematic data collection, collaboration, and evaluation. Our idenfitied overexpressed zoonoses will focus our efforts on tracking Giardia and Hookworm through multi-year trends. This assessment and proof of concept allows for illumination of gaps and limitations within the Army VS to effectively track the zoonotic burden of GOA and POA populations. Our current and future work will look to close surveillance gaps and help identify potential routes of transmission from companion animals to humans.References1. Edney AT. Companion animals and human health: an overview. J R Soc Med. 1995 Dec;88(12):704p-708p.2. Wells DL. The Effects of Animals on Human Health and Well-Being. Journal of Social Issues. 2009 Sep 1;65(3):523–43.3. O’Haire M. Companion animals and human health: Benefits, challenges, and the road ahead. Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research. 2010 Sep 1;5(5):226–34.4. Krahn LE, Tovar MD, Miller B. Are Pets in the Bedroom a Problem? Mayo Clinic Proceedings. 2015 Dec 1;90(12):1663–5.5. Day MJ, Breitschwerdt E, Cleaveland S, Karkare U, Khanna C, Kirpensteijn J, et al. Surveillance of Zoonotic Infectious Disease Transmitted by Small Companion Animals. Emerg Infect Dis. 2012 Dec;18(12):e1.6. Cook GC. Influence of diarrhoeal disease on military and naval campaigns. J R Soc Med. 2001 Feb 1;94(2):95–7.7. Sanchez JL, Gelnett J, Petruccelli BP, Defraites RF, Taylor DN. Diarrheal disease incidence and morbidity among United States military personnel during short-term missions overseas. The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene. 1998;58(3):299–304.8. Russell KL, Hawksworth AW, Ryan MAK, Strickler J, Irvine M, Hansen CJ, et al. Vaccine-preventable adenoviral respiratory illness in US military recruits, 1999–2004. Vaccine. 2006 Apr 5;24(15):2835–42.9. Richardson TR. DoD Directive 6400.04E: DoD Veterinary Public and Animal Health Services [Internet]. Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School; 2000 [cited 2017 Jul 26]. Available from: http://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/9216

We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Human history has witnessed varied surveillance and counter-surveillance activities from time immemorial. Human beings could not surveille others effectively and accurately without the technology of their era. Technology is a tool that can empower both people and governments. The outcomes are different based on the users’ intentions and aims. 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu noted that ‘If you know both yourself and your enemy, you can win numerous (literally, "a hundred") battles without jeopardy’. His words still ring true. To be a good surveiller and counter-surveiller it is essential to know both sides, and in order to be good at these activities access to technology is vital. There is no doubt that knowledge is power, and without technology to access the information, it is impossible to be powerful. As we become more expert at technology, we will learn what makes surveillance and counter-surveillance more effective, and will be more powerful.“Surveillance” is one of the most important aspects of living in the convergent media environment. This essay illustrates government surveillance and counter-surveillance during the Iranian Green Movement (2009) on social and mobile media. The Green Movement refers to a non-violent movement that arose after the disputed presidential election on June 2009. After that Iran was facing its most serious political crisis since the 1979 revolution. Claims of vote fraud triggered massive street protests. Many took to the streets with “Green” signs, chanting slogans such as ‘the government lied’, and ‘where is my vote?’ There is no doubt that social and mobile media has played an important role in Iran’s contemporary politics. According to Internet World Stats (IWS) Internet users in 2009 account for approximately 48.5 per cent of the population of Iran. In 2009, Iran had 30.2 million mobile phone users (Freedom House), and 72 cellular subscriptions for every 100 people (World Bank). Today, while Iran has the 19th-largest population in the world, its blogosphere holds the third spot in terms of number of users, just behind the United States and China (Beth Elson et al.). In this essay the use of social and mobile media (technology) is not debated, but the extent of this use, and who, why and how it is used, is clearly scrutinised.Visibility and Surveillance There have been different kinds of surveillance for a very long time. However, all types of surveillance are based on the notion of “visibility”. Previous studies show that visibility is not a new term (Foucault Discipline). The new things in the new era, are its scale, scope and complicated ways to watch others without being watched, which are not limited to a specific time, space and group, and are completely different from previous instruments for watching (Andrejevic). As Meikle and Young (146) have mentioned ‘networked digital media bring with them a new kind of visibility’, based on different kinds of technology. Internet surveillance has important implications in politics to control, protect, and influence (Marx Ethics; Castells; Fuchs Critique). Surveillance has been improved during its long history, and evolved from very simple spying and watching to complicated methods of “iSpy” (Andrejevic). To understand the importance of visibility and its relationship with surveillance, it is essential to study visibility in conjunction with the notion of “panopticon” and its contradictory functions. Foucault uses Bentham's notion of panopticon that carries within itself visibility and transparency to control others. “Gaze” is a central term in Bentham’s view. ‘Bentham thinks of a visibility organised entirely around a dominating, overseeing gaze’ (Foucault Eye). Moreover, Thomson (Visibility 11) notes that we are living in the age of ‘normalizing the power of the gaze’ and it is clear that the influential gaze is based on powerful means to see others.Lyon (Surveillance 2) explains that ‘surveillance is any collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purpose of influencing or managing those whose data have been granted…’. He mentions that today the most important means of surveillance reside in computer power which allows collected data to be sorted, matched, retrieved, processed, marketed and circulated.Nowadays, the Internet has become ubiquitous in many parts of the world. So, the changes in people’s interactions have influenced their lives. Fuchs (Introduction 15) argues that ‘information technology enables surveillance at a distance…in real time over networks at high transmission speed’. Therefore, visibility touches different aspects of people’s lives and living in a “glasshouse” has caused a lot of fear and anxiety about privacy.Iran’s Green Movement is one of many cases for studying surveillance and counter-surveillance technologies in social and mobile media. Government Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media in Iran, 2009 In 2009 the Iranian government controlled technology that allowed them to monitor, track, and limit access to the Internet, social media and mobiles communication, which has resulted in the surveillance of Green Movement’s activists. The Iranian government had improved its technical capabilities to monitor the people’s behavior on the Internet long before the 2009 election. The election led to an increase in online surveillance. Using social media the Iranian government became even more powerful than it was before the election. Social media was a significant factor in strengthening the government’s power. In the months after the election the virtual atmosphere became considerably more repressive. The intensified filtering of the Internet and implementation of more advanced surveillance systems strengthened the government’s position after the election. The Open Net Initiative revealed that the Internet censorship system in Iran is one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated censorship systems in the world. It emphasized that ‘Advances in domestic technical capacity have contributed to the implementation of a centralized filtering strategy and a reduced reliance on Western technologies’.On the other hand, the authorities attempted to block all access to political blogs (Jaras), either through cyber-security methods or through threats (Tusa). The Centre for Investigating Organized Cyber Crimes, which was founded in 2007 partly ‘to investigate and confront social and economic offenses on the Internet’ (Cyber Police), became increasingly important over the course of 2009 as the government combated the opposition’s online activities (Beth Elson et al. 16). Training of "senior Internet lieutenants" to confront Iran's "virtual enemies online" was another attempt that the Intelligence minister announced following the protests (Iran Media Program).In 2009 the Iranian government enacted the Computer Crime Law (Jaras). According to this law the Committee in Charge of Determining Unauthorized Websites is legally empowered to identify sites that carry forbidden content and report that information to TCI and other major ISPs for blocking (Freedom House). In the late fall of 2009, the government started sending threatening and warning text messages to protesters about their presence in the protests (BBC). Attacking, blocking, hacking and hijacking of the domain names of some opposition websites such as Jaras and Kaleme besides a number of non-Iranian sites such as Twitter were among the other attempts of the Iranian Cyber Army (Jaras).It is also said that the police and security forces arrested dissidents identified through photos and videos posted on the social media that many imagined had empowered them. Furthermore, the online photos of the active protesters were posted on different websites, asking people to identify them (Valizadeh).In late June 2009 the Iranian government was intentionally permitting Internet traffic to and from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter so that it could use a sophisticated practice called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to collect information about users. It was reportedly also applying the same technology to monitor mobile phone communications (Beth Elson et al. 15).On the other hand, to cut communication between Iranians inside and outside the country, Iran slowed down the Internet dramatically (Jaras). Iran also blocked access to Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter and many blogs before, during and after the protests. Moreover, in 2009, text message services were shut down for over 40 days, and mobile phone subscribers could not send or receive text messages regardless of their mobile carriers. Subsequently it was disrupted on a temporary basis immediately before and during key protests days.It was later discovered that the Nokia Siemens Network provided the government with surveillance technologies (Wagner; Iran Media Program). The Iranian government built a complicated system that enabled it to monitor, track and intercept what was said on mobile phones. Nokia Siemens Network confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls [...] The product allowed authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic (Cellan-Jones). Media sources also reported that two Chinese companies, Huawei and ZTE, provided surveillance technologies to the government. The Nic Payamak and Saman Payamak websites, that provide mass text messaging services, also reported that operator Hamrah Aval commonly blocked texts with words such as meeting, location, rally, gathering, election and parliament (Iran Media Program). Visibility and Counter-Surveillance The panopticon is not limited to the watchers. Similarly, new kinds of panopticon and visibility are not confined to government surveillance. Foucault points out that ‘the seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole’ (Discipline 207). What is important is Foucault's recognition that transparency, not only of those who are being observed but also of those who are observing, is central to the notion of the panopticon (Allen) and ‘any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how schools, hospitals, factories, and prisons function’ (Foucault, Discipline 207). Counter-surveillance is the process of detecting and mitigating hostile surveillance (Burton). Therefore, while the Internet is a surveillance instrument that enables governments to watch people, it also improves the capacity to counter-surveille, and draws public attention to governments’ injustice. As Castells (185) notes the Internet could be used by citizens to watch their government as an instrument of control, information, participation, and even decision-making, from the bottom up.With regards to the role of citizens in counter-surveillance we can draw on Jay Rosen’s view of Internet users as ‘the people formerly known as the audience’. In counter-surveillance it can be said that passive citizens (formerly the audience) have turned into active citizens. And this change was becoming impossible without mobile and social media platforms. These new techniques and technologies have empowered people and given them the opportunity to have new identities. When Thompson wrote ‘the exercise of power in modern societies remains in many ways shrouded in secrecy and hidden from the public gaze’ (Media 125), perhaps he could not imagine that one day people can gaze at the politicians, security forces and the police through the use of the Internet and mobile devices.Furthermore, while access to mobile media allows people to hold authorities accountable for their uses and abuses of power (Breen 183), social media can be used as a means of representation, organization of collective action, mobilization, and drawing attention to police brutality and reasons for political action (Gerbaudo).There is no doubt that having creativity and using alternative platforms are important aspects in counter-surveillance. For example, images of Lt. Pike “Pepper Spray Cop” from the University of California became the symbol of the senselessness of police brutality during the Occupy Movement (Shaw). Iranians’ Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media, 2009 Iran’s Green movement (2009) triggered a lot of discussions about the role of technology in social movements. In this regard, there are two notable attitudes about the role of technology: techno-optimistic (Shriky and Castells) and techno-pessimistic (Morozov and Gladwell) views should be taken into account. While techno-optimists overrated the role of social media, techno-pessimists underestimated its role. However, there is no doubt that technology has played a great role as a counter-surveillance tool amongst Iranian people in Iran’s contemporary politics.Apart from the academic discussions between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists, there have been numerous debates about the role of new technologies in Iran during the Green Movement. This subject has received interest from different corners of the world, including Western countries, Iranian authorities, opposition groups, and also some NGOs. However, its role as a means of counter-surveillance has not received adequate attention.As the tools of counter-surveillance are more or less the tools of surveillance, protesters learned from the government to use the same techniques to challenge authority on social media.Establishing new websites (such as JARAS, RASA, Kalemeh, and Iran green voice) or strengthening some previous ones (such as Saham, Emrooz, Norooz), also activating different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts to broadcast the voice of the Iranian Green Movement and neutralize the government’s propaganda were the most important ways to empower supporters of Iran’s Green Movement in counter-surveillance.‘Reporters Without Borders issued a statement, saying that ‘the new media, and particularly social networks, have given populations collaborative tools with which they can change the social order’. It is also mentioned that despite efforts by the Iranian government to prevent any reporting of the protests and due to considerable pressure placed on foreign journalists inside Iran, social media played a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world (Axworthy). However, at that moment, many thought that Twitter performed a liberating role for Iranian dissenters. For example, Western media heralded the Green Movement in Iran as a “Twitter revolution” fuelled by information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social media tools (Carrieri et al. 4). “The Revolution Will Be Twittered” was the first in a series of blog posts published by Andrew Sullivan a few hours after the news of the protests was released.According to the researcher’s observation the numbers of Twitter users inside Iran who tweeted was very limited in 2009 and social media was most useful in the dissemination of information, especially from those inside Iran to outsiders. Mobile phones were mostly influential as an instrument firstly used for producing contents (images and videos) and secondly for the organisation of protests. There were many photos and videos that were filmed by very simple mobile cell phones, uploaded by ordinary people onto YouTube and other platforms. The links were shared many times on Twitter and Facebook and released by mainstream media. The most frequently circulated story from the Iranian protests was a video of Neda Agha-Sultan. Her final moments were captured by some bystanders with mobile phone cameras and rapidly spread across the global media and the Internet. It showed that the camera-phone had provided citizens with a powerful means, allowing for the creation and instant sharing of persuasive personalised eyewitness records with mobile and globalised target populations (Anden-Papadopoulos).Protesters used another technique, DDOS (distributed denial of service attacks), for political protest in cyber space. Anonymous people used DDOS to overload a website with fake requests, making it unavailable for users and disrupting the sites set as targets (McMillan) in effect, shutting down the site. DDOS is an important counter-surveillance activity by grassroots activists or hackers. It was a cyber protest that knocked the main Iranian governmental websites off-line and caused crowdsourcing and false trafficking. Amongst them were Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's supreme leader’s websites and those which belong to or are close to the government or security forces, including news agencies (Fars, IRNA, Press TV…), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Police, and the Ministry of the Interior.Moreover, as authorities uploaded the pictures of protesters onto different platforms to find and arrest them, in some cities people started to put the pictures, phone numbers and addresses of members of security forces and plain clothes police officers who attacked them during the protests and asked people to identify and report the others. They also wanted people to send information about suspects who infringed human rights. Conclusion To sum up, visibility, surveillance and counter-surveillance are not new phenomena. What is new is the technology, which increased their complexity. As Foucault (Discipline 200) mentioned ‘visibility is a trap’, so being visible would be the weakness of those who are being surveilled in the power struggle. In the convergent era, in order to be more powerful, both surveillance and counter-surveillance activities aim for more visibility. Although both attempt to use the same means (technology) to trap the other side, the differences are in their subjects, objects, goals and results.While in surveillance, visibility of the many by the few is mostly for the purpose of control and influence in undemocratic ways, in counter-surveillance, the visibility of the few by the many is mostly through democratic ways to secure more accountability and transparency from the governments.As mentioned in the case of Iran’s Green Movement, the scale and scope of visibility are different in surveillance and counter-surveillance. The importance of what Shaw wrote about Sydney occupy counter-surveillance, applies to other places, such as Iran. She has stressed that ‘protesters and police engaged in a dance of technology and surveillance with one another. Both had access to technology, but there were uncertainties about the extent of technology and its proficient use…’In Iran (2009), both sides (government and activists) used technology and benefited from digital networked platforms, but their levels of access and domains of influence were different, which was because the sources of power, information and wealth were divided asymmetrically between them. Creativity was important for both sides to make others more visible, and make themselves invisible. Also, sharing information to make the other side visible played an important role in these two areas. References Alen, David. “The Trouble with Transparency: The Challenge of Doing Journalism Ethics in a Surveillance Society.” Journalism Studies 9.3 (2008): 323-40. 8 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616700801997224#.UqRFSuIZsqN›. 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Reporters without Borders. “Web 2.0 versus Control 2.0.” 2010. 27 May 2014 ‹http://en.rsf.org/web-2-0-versus-control-2-0-18-03-2010,36697›.Rosen, Jay. The People Formerly Known as the Audience. 2006. 7 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-rosen/the-people-formerly-known_1_b_24113.html›. Shaw, Frances. “'Walls of Seeing': Protest Surveillance, Embodied Boundaries, and Counter-Surveillance at Occupy Sydney.” Transformation 23 (2013). 9 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_23/article_04.shtml›. “The Warning of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to the Weblogs and Websites.” BBC, 2009. 27 July 2014 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2009/06/090617_ka_ir88_sepah_internet.shtml›. Thompson, John B. The Media And Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Thompson, John B. “The New Visibility.” Theory, Culture & Society 22.6 (2005): 31-51. 10 Dec. 2013 ‹http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/22/6/31.full.pdf+html›. 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There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-cocktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, pornography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Crawford, Kate. “Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks.” Media International Australia 114 (2005): 30-39. Cubitt, Sean. “Distribution and Media Flows.” Cultural Politics 1.2 (2005): 193-214. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ———. “Control and Becoming.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 169-176. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-182. Eriksson, Magnus, and Rasmus Fleische. “Copies and Context in the Age of Cultural Abundance.” Online posting. 5 June 2007. Nettime 25 Aug 2007. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McKenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action.” Culture, Theory and Critique 47.2 (2006): 197-212. Parikka, Jussi. “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7.2 (2007): 287-308. “Piracy Online.” Recording Industry Association of America. 28 Aug 2007. http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php>. Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. Delhi, Sarai Media Lab, 2001. 93-99. http://www.sarai.net>. Terranova, Tiziana. “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information.” Social Text 22.3 (2004): 51-73. ———. “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in Open Systems.” DATA Browser 03 – Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Ed. Joasia Krysa. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. 27-38. Thrift, Nigel. “Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification.” Economy and Society 35.2 (2006): 279-306. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dieter, Michael. "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>. APA Style Dieter, M. (Oct. 2007) "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>.

During the last one hundred years, science has played a major role in compressing time and physical space through technological advances. Countries and peoples once thoroughly detached from each other are now linked in economic, political, and cultural cooperation and exchange. The challenges ahead are apparent. Scientists, as well as world leaders, must understand other cultures if they wish to share ideas and values, transfer technology, establish personal relationships, and help tomorrow’s leaders in the quest for a peaceful and equitable global society. Responding to these challenges across disciplines, education at the college and university level is becoming increasingly multicultural. However, science education has not risen sufficiently to this challenge. An appreciation and knowledge of foreign cultures, literatures, and languages are essential to science students as well as students in the humanities and social science if they are to assume leadership roles in the new multicultural world. Because of the critical role that science and technology will play in this new world, the challenge of educating scientists with global competence is urgent. Science students need to be in contact with alternative ways of thinking and doing things from around the globe, and they need to have a better understanding of the global effect of their work. Subtle and not so subtle differences in culture can neither be learned in a classroom nor obtained from books. They must be experienced. In today’s world, universities can no longer afford to produce scientific experts who are not adequately prepared for the wider global arena. Nevertheless, undergraduate science majors seldom participate in international studies and study abroad programs. At many U.S. colleges and universities, less than 4 percent of the students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in the physical sciences have studied abroad, compared with over 50 percent of the students graduating with a major in the arts of humanities. Before they can embark on an international science education program, science faculty and students need some idea of the scientific environment into which the students will be placed. As a first step in defining this environment, papers in these proceedings, Section I, discuss the similarities and differences in science education in different cultures. Each presenter provides an overview of science education from kindergarten through the Ph.D. in his or her own culture. The goals of science education and questions of how science students are recruited, including questions or gender representation, are explored. This overview provides a range of models for science education, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, Iris Huang describes the centralized system of science education that characterizes China. Here teachers teach from standard textbooks and must reach curriculum goals established by the national government. In contrast, since the federal government of the United States has no authority to control science education, there is considerable state to state variability in what is covered. Additionally, as described by Audrey Champagne, education in the United States is subject to local economic, political, and cultural factors. The goals of science education are also quite variable from country to country. On the one hand, as described by T.N. Goh, the main objective of science education in Singapore is to enhance national competitiveness in the world industrial and service sectors. This is in contrast to the objective in Europe, where science is taught because it is considered an area with which an educated person should be familiar. In order to set the context for the student experience, the second section of this volume addresses some of the global questions raised by science and technology. For example, David Pimentel discusses the problems created by an increasing population whereas Paul Connett addresses the question of economic growth versus sustainable survival. Healing traditions, study abroad for prospective health professionals, and science communication ethics are discussed in other papers in this section. The papers in this section are not meant to be definitive treatises. Rather, they raise these issues to eye level for faculty and students. These discussions provide some of the justification as well as the context for science abroad programs. Section III is the keystone section of the proceedings. Ben DeWinter provides an overview of the needs, values, and problems of science students participating in study abroad programs. This is followed by discussions of the opportunities, challenges, and models of programs in engineering, the biological/environmental sciences, and the physical sciences. Section IV presents possibilities for the future with discussions about electronic communications, teaching science with a more global perspective, and the future of science education. The symposium in which these papers were presented was held at Cornell University on June 9-12, 1996. The main sponsor was the New York State Pew Program in Undergraduate Science Education. Cosponsoring institutions included Denmark International Study Program, Leiden University, the University of Manchester, Ben-Gurion University, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the National University of Singapore. It is hoped that these proceedings will serve as a road map for future science education programs. It is meant to provide justifications and models for colleges and universities that wish to pursue foreign programs for their students. We hope it will serve as a resource for educators, administrators, scientists, and students who are interested in an international experience for their students. The editors are grateful to the members of the Organizing Committee, in particular to Dr. Yervant Terzian, the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University and Director of the Pew Science Program, for proposing this topic for the conference of the New York State Program in Undergraduate Science Education and providing the leadership for the conference. The other members of the Organizing Committee were Dr. Bruce Lewenstein, Associate Professor in the Departments of Communication and Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, and Dr. Terry Weiner, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Union College. Very special thanks go to Ms. Sue Chamberlain, Assistant Director of Education for the Pew Science Program at Cornell, who coordinated all the administrative aspects of the conference with great skill and grace. David E. Hornung Urbain (Ben) DeWinter

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash INTRODUCTION When the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, governments and healthcare systems scrambled to control it. While most of the global public health community agreed that actions against the COVID-19 pandemic needed to be prompt and efficient, there were disagreements on what those actions should be. Some governments opted to adopt a containment strategy while others implemented mitigation measures; each had reasons to support their course of action, whether rooted in governmental structures, scientific findings, beliefs, or ethical and moral values. However, the dramatically different response strategies may have led to disparate results. This divide is furthered when ethical and moral values and cultural norms are added to this equation. In this paper, I will examine China and Korea, two countries that implemented a preventative containment strategy, and the United States of America and the United Kingdom, which adopted mitigation strategies. I will examine the differences in their outcomes and whether there is a “correct” response to pandemics like COVID-19. l. Response in China and Korea After its initial discovery in December 2019, COVID-19 rapidly spread beyond China to surrounding countries, including South Korea, Japan, and Singapore. China implemented swift measures drawing on its experience with the SARS outbreak. Measures included lockdowns, contact tracing, testing all individuals exposed to the virus, and consequently enforcing isolation and quarantine provisions.[1] During the early stages, the public health systems and the national government moved to a “health care to all” system to avoid nationwide spread. The government and all sectors of society were mobilized to track, contain, and adapt to the overall state of the epidemic.[2] COVID-19 continued and spread in China during Lunar New Year celebrations when population movement within the country was at its peak. Thus, Wuhan entered lockdown to control the number of infected people leaving the city to contain the virus;[3] even in areas where there were few to no cases, the general population of China voluntarily abided by measures like those implemented in Wuhan. The measures included wearing masks, social distancing, and following stay-at-home orders. Furthermore, healthcare workers from all over the country volunteered to travel to Hubei, where Wuhan is, and assembled several Fangcang shelter hospitals.[4] Fangcang hospitals were designed based on emergency medical care cabins that were used after two devastating earthquakes in China and served as temporary quarantine housing and hospital facilities.[5] They are mobile, have fast deployment, and can adapt quickly to different environments. At the start of the pandemic, Wuhan converted gymnasiums, convention centers, sports arenas and training centers, factories, and other venues into Fangcang hospitals. Although temporary, these quarantine hospital facilities were equipped with full medical equipment and personnel, allowing for complete medical functions for “treatment, disease monitoring, diagnosis and other clinical tasks.”[6] Teams of psychologists were also assigned to each hospital to provide counseling for patients.[7] Beyond separating those who were infected from the rest of the population and thus having more control over the community spread of the virus, Fangcang hospitals played a vital role in reducing patient density in traditional hospitals and medical centers by expanding treatment capacities.[8] South Korea reported its first COVID-19 case in January 2020, and, within days, the government activated the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters.[9] Similar to China, South Korea used existing epidemic protocols and implemented the 3Ts strategy, prioritizing testing, tracing, and treatment.[10] High-capacity screening facilities and working with the private sector to ensure an adequate supply of tests made South Korea’s efforts successful.[11] The South Korean government strictly regulated self-isolation and quarantine. Contact tracing efforts used various data sources, “including credit card transactions and closed-circuit television footage.”[12] The government also placed stringent restrictions on travel, beginning with designated entry lines and questionnaires, but expanding to include temperature checks, testing for all travelers at the border, and a mandatory fourteen-day monitored quarantine for anyone entering the country.[13] The majority of the population responded immediately with compliance, with national weekly movement decreasing by 38 percent between February 24, 2020, and March 1, 2020, compared to the corresponding week the previous month. Schools swiftly closed across the nation, and the entire country transitioned to remote learning until the gradual reopening in May and June 2020.[14] There was some discontentment within the population, especially with the South Korean government’s practice of publicly announcing the names of individuals who tested positive.[15] Critics of this practice say it is an infringement of patient privacy and can even be viewed as an invitation to public bullying.[16] However, even with some dissatisfaction with government regulations, a survey of 1,200 South Koreans in September 2020 asking people to agree if they were satisfied with the government’s response showed that the overwhelming majority either agreed or strongly agreed (44.08 percent and 19.75 percent, respectively), and less than 20 percent of the respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed (11.50 percent and 5.08 percent, respectively).[17] Regulations surrounding isolation and quarantine were strict and applied to those with confirmed cases of COVID-19, anyone who traveled internationally, or individuals suspected to be infected. Individuals were required to use the Self-Quarantine Safety Protection app that tracked location for fourteen days to ensure that quarantine protocols were followed.[18] Case officers monitored the app, and violators not only faced a substantial fine but were also required to wear electronic wristbands that would alert the officers if the individual left the location of their mobile device.[19] ll. The Western Response: The UK and US COVID-19 was reported in many Western nations around January 2020. However, unlike South Korea, many countries did not immediately respond to the outbreak with surveillance and containment strategies but had a wait-and-see approach. As the pandemic worsened, they gradually adopted mitigation strategies to combat the disease as it progressed. While the US adopted a combination of containment and mitigation strategies, a concrete response from state and federal governments did not occur until March 2020.[20] Even then, many states did little to address the pandemic. Although equipped with a robust healthcare system, a shortage of ventilators and hospital beds became evident in some localities early on. The US healthcare system failed to acknowledge the pandemic and prepare a coordinated response in time to stop the momentum of the disease.[21] The goal became “flattening the curve” (keeping the number of cases that needed hospital care low enough to avoid overwhelming the hospital system) as it was clear containment would be impossible. Once tests were developed, poor coordination of testing efforts and insufficient resources to test at the necessary scale to provide comprehensive national surveillance of the disease further hindered efforts to contain infected individuals and decelerate its spread.[22] Eventually, regulations and mitigation measures were implemented, including mask mandates, school closures, caps or bans on in-person gatherings, and the closure of non-essential businesses.[23] However, enforcement of these measures proved difficult, and people instigated protests against many of the recommended policies and requirements. The UK and the US both encountered a shortage of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers.[24] However, a more prominent problem arose from the UK’s initial response to the pandemic. The UK first said COVID-19 was like influenza and therefore did not call for emergency measures to deter its spread.[25] Furthermore, in the first few weeks of the pandemic, the UK government believed herd immunity was the best course of action, stating that most people would have mild symptoms,[26] and the population would become mostly immune to the virus once enough people were infected.[27] In theory, herd immunity was a potentially effective strategy. The public health authorities thought that if the threshold for herd immunity was reached, enough people would have developed protective antibodies against any future infection.[28] However, the risks of COVID-19 were high and the cases “would lead to high rates of hospitalization and need for critical care, straining health service capacity past the breaking point.”[29] Furthermore, while getting COVID-19 would offer some natural immunity against reinfection, reinfection remained a possibility, especially during the early stages of the pandemic when vaccines were unavailable.[30] Later, when vaccines were available, a study showed that an unvaccinated person who contracted the virus was more than twice as likely to become reinfected than a fully vaccinated person.[31] The UK government also expressed concern for “behavioral fatigue.”[32] It claimed that if restrictions were enforced pre-emptively and prematurely, people might become progressively “uncooperative and less vigilant.”[33] Regarding the concern for “behavioral fatigue,” numerous behavioral scientists stated that they were unconvinced that this reason was enough to hold off implementing restrictions. There was a lack of evidence of this phenomenon, and a group of 681 UK behavioral scientists said in an open letter that “[s]uch evidence is necessary if we are to base a high-risk public health strategy on it.”[34] Fortunately, this strategy only remained under consideration for a short period. After rapid increases in confirmed cases and deaths due to COVID-19, the UK government implemented more strict measures, like city lockdown, school closures, and the closure of non-essential businesses.[35] These restrictions took legal effect on March 26th, 2020 – around two weeks after the first proposal of the “herd immunity” strategy.[36] lll. Comparing the Two Approaches The Eastern and Western countries experienced significant outbreaks of COVID-19. However, looking at the mortality rate and new confirmed cases, the differences between the two categories of response to COVID-19 are significant. As of December 31, 2020, the mortality rate per 100,000 population for China and South Korea were 0.3 and 1.8, respectively, and new confirmed cases per day per 100,000 population were 87 and 1,029, respectively. However, the mortality rates per 100,000 in the US and the UK were 107 and 108, respectively, and they had up to 234,133 and 56,029 new confirmed cases every day, respectively.[37] As of July 2022, total deaths in China were 22, 994[38] (population 1.45 billion)[39] and in South Korea 24,794[40] (population 51.36 million)[41] compared to 1,015,093[42] in the US (population 335.03 million)[43] and 182,727[44] in the UK (population 68.62 million).[45] Further differences can be seen in the varying sectors of society, such as healthcare systems and authority models, political structures, and cultural customs among these countries, which in turn affect the response and control strategies.[46] In the US and the UK, rights-based political structures affected the response, making tracking and surveillance more problematic early on. But Western countries did have strict lockdowns and quarantines. China and South Korea maintained a proactive approach by “identifying and managing cases, tracking and isolating close contacts, and strictly restricting or controlling population movement when feasible and appropriate.”[47] In contrast, the UK implemented nationwide lockdowns early on, and the US restrictions varied among states. Both the UK and the US focused on treating the severe cases and those with underlying conditions rather than proactively preventing new cases from developing in the early pandemic.[48] They did shift gears to mass testing schemes and attempts to slow transmission. By the time they implemented cohesive strategies, COVID-19 was widespread. Due to their slow initial responses, they needed to manage an onslaught of cases while trying to prevent transmission. lV. Ethical Implications The “West vs. Rest” culture divide emerges when comparing the COVID-19 response strategies of East Asian countries to those of Western countries. The differences in their strategies further highlight the differences in the prevailing moral values influencing public policy. The preventative stance adopted by many East Asian countries shows a stronger collective identity among citizens. But it also may show more substantial governmental power and less appetite for protest. In contrast, the mostly non-interfering nature of Western governments’ actions shows a reliance on the “autonomous and unanimous responsibility of individuals.”[49] The moral values in the US also may reflect the prioritized position of personal rights and the suspicion of intrusive government policies. Culturally, the populations of South Korea and China are generally more tolerant of personal data-sharing and monitoring, suggesting there is less concern for autonomy or privacy. However, many people in the US and UK would consider the use of location tracking apps and electronic bracelets to be violations of individual autonomy and privacy.[50] Sectors of the Western world also argue that mandating masking or social distancing imposes on individual autonomy and free will. Mask-wearing was an existing practice in East Asian countries, even without mandates or pandemics. Individuals wear masks for common colds and influenza and do not consider a mask requirement an infringement of their autonomy. Furthermore, whether it is due to the authoritarian nature of the government or not, there is a general tendency toward public compliance and accepting government policies in many East Asian countries,[51] and the lack of public dissent played an important part in making combating COVID-19 easier for countries like China and South Korea. The lack of initiative from Western nations arguably violates the bioethical principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence.[52] For example, the promotion of the “herd immunity” strategy from the UK government and consequently the government’s inaction, risked the well-being of its citizens. The government failed to avoid the harm that COVID-19 brought. Similarly, by delaying its response until nearly two months after the initial case was reported, the US also violated the principle of non-maleficence. The success seen in South Korea and China during the early pandemic better exemplifies beneficence and nonmaleficence. The strategy of contact tracing and strict containment saved lives. The consequences of the restrictions varied across the countries as well. Not everyone can afford to self-isolate or quarantine and being required to do so can significantly impact many individuals’ well-being. Furthermore, not everyone’s occupation allows them to work from home and business closures disadvantaged portions of the population disparately. For those who are essential workers, school closures may also burden parents who do not have access to affordable childcare. The stringent restrictions regarding quarantine and self-isolation in East Asian countries also harmed people disparately, raising problems surrounding the principle of justice. However, the speed at which China had COVID-19 contained allowed people there to return to their normal lives quickly. Compared to some Western countries’ waves of lockdown and reinforcement of restrictions, the “zero-COVID” strategy in countries like China showed success, at least during the early stages of the pandemic. The contact tracing and containment was likely financially beneficial. While the pandemic resulted in substantial economic growth downgrades and global recessions, regions like East Asia were estimated to grow by around 0.5 percent. In comparison, the economy in regions like Europe contracted by around 4.7 percent.[53] CONCLUSION China arguably had an advantage in combating COVID-19 since the outbreak was relatively concentrated in one region. This allowed early detection of symptoms and quick containment of the virus. Other countries, like the US, had new cases on both coasts early in the pandemic; thus, containment was more challenging than it was in China. However, the delayed and reluctant response from countries like the US and the UK did not benefit the well-being of their populations and proved to put more stress on their healthcare systems. While mass tracking of people is politically contentious, the promptness of actions many East Asian countries employed at the beginning of COVID-19 seemed to be the more effective course of action that best protected the well-being of their citizens. - [1] Chen, Haiqian, et al. “Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparison of Strategies in Six Countries.” Frontiers in Public Health, vol. 9, September 30, 2021, pp. 1-11. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.708496. [2] Chen, et al. [3] Chen, et al. [4] Chen, et al. [5] Wang, Ke-Wei, et al. “Fangcang shelter hospitals are a One Health approach for responding to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China.” One Health, vol. 10, August 29th, 2020, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1016/j.onehlt.2020.100167. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352771420302688. [6] Wang. [7] Wang. [8] Wang. [9] Kim, June-Ho, et al. “Emerging COVID-19 Success Story: South Korea Learned the Lesson of MERS.” Our World Data, University of Oxford, March 5, 2021. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-south-korea. [10] Chen, Haiqian, et al. [11] Kim, et al. [12] Kim. [13] Kim. [14] Scott, Dylan and Jun Michael Park. “South Korea’s Covid-19 success story started with failure.” Vox, April 19, 2021. https://www.vox.com/22380161/south-korea-covid-19-coronavirus-pandemic-contact-tracing-testing.. [15] Scott and Park. [16] Rich, Timothy S., et al. “What Do South Koreans Think of Their Government’s COVID-19 Response?” The Diplomat, October 7, 2020. https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/what-do-south-koreans-think-of-their-governments-covid-19-response/. [17] Rich, et al. [18] Kim, et al. [19] Kim, et al. [20] Chen, et al. [21] Chen, et al. [22] Chen, et al. [23] Chen, et al. [24] Chen, et al. [25]Chen, et al. [26] Chen, et al. [27] O’Grady, Cathleen. “The U.K. backed off on herd immunity. To beat COVID-19, we’ll ultimately need it.” National Geographics, March 20, 2020. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/uk-backed-off-on-herd-immunity-to-beat-coronavirus-we-need-it. [28] “Herd immunity and COVID-19: What you need to know.” Mayo Clinic, April 20, 2022. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/herd-immunity-and-coronavirus/art-20486808?p=1. [29] O’Grady. [30] O’Grady. [31] Mayo Clinic, April 20, 2022. [32] Yong, Ed. “The UK’s Coronavirus ‘Herd Immunity’ Debacle.” The Atlantic, March 16, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-herd-immunity-uk-boris-johnson/608065/. [33] Yong. [34] Harvey, Nigel. “Behavioral Fatigue: Real Phenomenon, Naïve Construct or Policy Contrivance?” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, November 6, 2020. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.589892, quoting a March 16, 2020 open letter to the UK government. [35] Chen, et al. [36]“Timeline of UK coronavirus lockdowns, March 2020 to March 2021.” Institute for Government Analysis. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/timeline-lockdown-web.pdf. [37] Chen, et al. [38] “China: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard.” World Health Organization, 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn. [39] “China Population.” Worldometer, 2022, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/china-population/. [40] “The Republic of South Korea: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard.” World Health Organization, 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/kr. [41] “South Korea Population,” Worldometer, 2022, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-population/. [42] “The United States of America: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard.” World Health Organization, 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/us. [43] “United States Population,” Worldometer, 2022, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/. [44] “The United Kingdom: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard.” World Health Organization, 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/gb. [45] “U.K. Population,” Worldometer, 2022, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/. [46] Chen, et al. [47] Chen, et al., p 6. [48] Chen, et al. [49] Festing, Marion, Tobias Schumacher and Yong-Yueh Lee. “How Cultural Norms and Values Shape National Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic.” The London School of Economics and Political Science, April 15, 2021. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/04/15/how-cultural-norms-and-values-shaped-national-responses-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/. [50] Festing, et al. [51] Festing, et al. [52] Beauchamp, Tom L. and James F. Childress. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). [53] “The Global Economic Outlook During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Changed World.” The World Bank, June 8, 2020. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/06/08/the-global-economic-outlook-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-changed-world.

Usually, a literature search is a benign phase of the research regime. It was, however, during this phase on my current project where a semi-conscious pique I’d been feeling developed into an obvious rancour. Because I’ve been involved in both electronic production and consumption, and the pedagogy surrounding it, I was interested in how the literate domain was coping with the transformations coming out of the new media communications r/evolution. This concern became clearer with the reading and re-reading of Kathleen Tyner’s book, Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Sometimes, irritation is a camouflage for an emerging and hybridised form of knowledge, so it was necessary to unearth this masquerade of discord that welled-up in the most unexpected of places. Literacy in a Digital World makes all the right noises: it discusses technology; Walter Ong; media literacy; primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling; Plato’s Phaedrus; psychoanalysis; storytelling; networks; aesthetics; even numeracy and multiliteracies, along with a host of other highly appropriate subject matter vis-à-vis its object of analysis. On one reading, it’s a highly illuminating overview. There is, however, a differing interpretation of Literacy in a Digital World, and it’s of a more sombre hue. This other more doleful reading makes Literacy in a Digital World a superior representative of a sometimes largely under-theorised control-complex, and an un.conscious authoritarianism, implicit in the production of any type of knowledge. Of course, in this instance the type of production referenced is literate in orientation. The literate domain, then, is not merely an angel of enlightened debate; under the influence and direction of particular human configurations, literacy has its power struggles with other forms of representation. If the PR machine encourages a more seraphical view of the culture industry, it comes at the expense of the latter’s sometimes-tyrannical underbelly. It is vital, then, to question and investigate these un.conscious forces, specifically in relation to the production of literate forms of culture and the ‘discourse’ it carries on regarding electronic forms of knowledge, a paradigm for which is slowly emerging electracy and a subject I will return to. This assertion is no overstatement. Literacy in a Digital World has concealed within its discourse the assumption that the dominant modes of teaching and learning are literate and will continue to be so. That is, all knowledge is mediated via either typographic or chirographic words on a page, or even on a screen. This is strange given that Tyner admits in the Introduction that “I am an itinerant teacher, reluctant writer, and sometimes media producer” (1, my emphasis). The orientation in Literacy in a Digital World, it seems to me, is a mask for the authoritarianism at the heart of the literate establishment trying to contain and corral the intensifying global flows of electronic information. Ironically, it also seems to be a peculiarly electronic way to present information: that is, the sifting, analysis, and categorisation, along with the representation of phenomena, through the force of one’s un.conscious biases, with the latter making all knowledge production laden with emotional causation. This awkwardness in using the term “literacy” in relation to electronic forms of knowledge surfaces once more in Paul Messaris’s Visual “Literacy”. Again, this is peculiar given that this highly developed and informative text might be a fine introduction to electracy as a possible alternative paradigm to literacy, if only, for instance, it made some mention of sound as a counterpoint to textual and visual symbolisation. The point where Messaris passes over this former contradiction is worth quoting: Strictly speaking, of course, the term “literacy” should be applied only to reading and writing. But it would probably be too pedantic and, in any case, it would surely be futile to resist the increasingly common tendency to apply this term to other kinds of communication skills (mathematical “literacy,” computer “literacy”) as well as to the substantive knowledge that communication rests on (historical, geographic, cultural “literacy”). (2-3) While Messaris might use the term “visual literacy” reluctantly, the assumption that literacy will take over the conceptual reins of electronic communication and remain the pre-eminent form of knowledge production is widespread. This assumption might be happening in the literature on the subject but in the wider population there is a rising electrate sensibility. It is in the work of Gregory Ulmer that electracy is most extensively articulated, and the following brief outline has been heavily influenced by his speculation on the subject. Electracy is a paradigm that requires, in the production and consumption of electronic material, highly developed competencies in both oracy and literacy, and if necessary comes on top of any knowledge of the subject or content of any given work, program, or project. The conceptual frame of electracy is herein tentatively defined as both a well-developed range and depth of communicative competency in oral, literate, and electronic forms, biased from the latter’s point of view. A crucial addition, one sometimes overlooked in earlier communicative forms, is that of the technate, or technacy, a working knowledge of the technological infrastructure underpinning all communication and its in-built ideological assumptions. It is in this context of the various communicative competencies required for electronic production and consumption that the term ‘literacy’ (or for that matter ‘oracy’) is questionable. Furthermore, electracy can spread out to mean the following: it is that domain of knowledge formation whose arrangement, transference, and interpretation rely primarily on electronic networks, systems, codes and apparatuses, for either its production, circulation, or consumption. It could be analogue, in the sense of videotape; digital, in the case of the computer; aurally centred, as in the examples of music, radio or sound-scapes; mathematically configured, in relation to programming code for instance; visually fixated, as in broadcast television; ‘amateur’, as in the home-video or home-studio realm; politically sensitive, in the case of surveillance footage; medically fixated, as in the orbit of tomography; ambiguous, as in the instance of The Sydney Morning Herald made available on the WWW, or of Hollywood blockbusters broadcast on television, or hired/bought in a DVD/video format; this is not to mention Brad Pitt reading a classic novel on audio-tape. Electracy is a strikingly simple, yet highly complex and heterogeneous communicative paradigm. Electracy is also a generic term, one whose very comprehensiveness and dynamic mutability is its defining hallmark, and one in which a whole host of communicative codes and symbolic systems reside. Moreover, almost anyone can comprehend meaning in electronic media because “electric epistemology cannot remain confined to small groups of users, as oral epistemologies have, and cannot remain the property of an educated elite, as literate epistemologies have” (Gozzi and Haynes 224). Furthermore, as Ulmer writes: “To speak of computer literacy or media literacy may be an attempt to remain within the apparatus of alphabetic writing that has organized the Western tradition for nearly the past three millennia” (“Foreword” xii). The catch is that the knowledge forms thus produced through electracy are the abstract epistemological vectors on which the diverse markets of global capitalism thrive. The dynamic nature of these “multimodal” forms of electronic knowledge (Kress, “Visual” 73), then, is increasingly applicable to all of us in the local/global, human/world conglomerate in which any polity is now framed. To continue to emphasise literacy and alphabetic consciousness might then be blinding us to this emerging relationship between electracy and globalisation, possibly even to localisation and regionalisation. It may be possible to trace the dichotomy outlined above between literate and electrate forms of knowledge to larger political/economic and cultural forces. As Saskia Sassen illustrates, sovereignty and territoriality are central aspects in the operation of the still important nation-state, especially in an era of encroaching globalisation. In the past, sovereignty referred to the absolute power of monarchs to control their dominions and is an idea that has been transferred to the nation-state in the long transition to representative democracy. Territoriality refers to the specific physical space that sovereignty is seen as guaranteeing. As Sassen writes, “In the main … rule in the modern world flows from the absolute sovereignty of the state over its national territory” (3). Quite clearly, in the shifting regimes of geo-political power that characterise the global era, sovereign control over territory, and, equally, control over the ideas that might reconfigure our interpretation of concepts such as sovereignty and territoriality, nationalism and literacy, are all in a state of change. Today’s climate of geo-political uncertainty has undoubtedly produced a control complex in relation to these shifting power bases, a condition that arises when psychic, epistemological and political certainties move to a state of unpredictable flux. In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities another important examination of nationalism there is an emphasis on how literacy was an essential ingredient in its development as a political structure. Operational levels of literacy also came to be a key component in the development of the idea of the autonomous self that arose with democracy and its use as an organising principle in citizenship rituals like voting in some nation-states. Eric Leed puts it this way: “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Clearly, any conception of sovereignty and territoriality has to be read, after being written constitutionally, by those people who form the basis of a national polity and over whom these two categories operate. The “fundamental anxiety” over literacy that Kress speaks of (Before Writing 1) is a sub-component of this larger control complex in that a quantum increase in the volume and diversity of electronic communication is contributing to declining levels of literacy in the body politic. In the current moment there is a control complex of almost plague proportions in our selves, our systems of knowledge, and our institutions and polities, because it is undoubtedly a key factor at the epicentre of any turf war. Even my own strident anxieties over the dominance of literacy in debates over electronic communication deserve to be laid out on the analyst’s couch, in part because any manifestation of the control complex in a turf war is aimed squarely at the repression of alternative ways of being and becoming. The endgame: it might be wiser to more closely examine this literacy control complex, possible alternative paradigms of knowledge production and consumption such as electracy, and their broader relationship to patterns of political/economic/cultural organisation and control. Acknowledgements I am indebted to Patrice Braun and Ros Mills, respectively, for editorial advice and technical assistance in the preparation of this essay. Note on reading “The Literacy Control Complex” The dot configuration in ‘un.conscious’ is used deliberately as an electronic marker to implicitly indicate the omni-directional nature of the power surges that dif.fuse the conscious and the unconscious in the field of political action where any turf war is conducted. While this justification is not obvious, I do want to create a sense of intrigue in the reader as to why this dot configuration might be used. One of the many things that fascinates me about electronic communication is its considerable ability for condensation; the sound-bite is one epistemological example of this idea, the dot, as an electronic form of conceptual elision, is another. If you are interested in this field, I highly recommend perusal of the MEZ posts that crop up periodically on a number of media related lists. MEZ’s posts have made me more cognisant of electronic forms of written expression. These experiments in electronic writing deserve to be tested. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Gozzi Jr., Raymond, and W. Lance Haynes. “Electric Media and Electric Epistemology: Empathy at a Distance.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9.3 (1992): 217-28. Messaris, Paul. Visual “Literacy”: Image, Mind, and Reality. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Kress, Gunther. “Visual and Verbal Modes of Representation in Electronically Mediated Communication: The Potentials of New Forms of Text.” Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Ilana Snyder. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. 53-79. ---. Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London: Routledge, 1997. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41-61. Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Tyner, Kathleen. Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. Ulmer, Gregory. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York: Routledge, 1989. ---. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. New York: Johns Hopkins U P, 1994. ---. “Foreword/Forward (Into Electracy).” Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Todd Taylor and Irene Ward. New York: Columbia U P, 1998. ix-xiii. ---. Internet Invention: Literacy into Electracy. Boston: Longman, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Maybury, Terrence. "The Literacy Control Complex" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/05-literacy.php>. APA Style Maybury, T. (2004, Mar17). The Literacy Control Complex. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/05-literacy.php>

In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. 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Over the last decade or so, much has been written about the possibilities offered by the internet for creating sites of community based on exchange, collaboration, and reciprocity. Since Howard Rheingold published his polemic, The Virtual Community, in 1993, much has been written on this subject. The notion of just what constitutes ‘virtual reality’ has been extensively debated; however, ‘community’ is almost universally assumed to be good. There are failed communities and successful communities, but the critique of ‘community’ itself as a concept stops there. How, then, do we account for websites that create a sense of community precisely through the promotion of hatred and violence, and on which hatred of others is what the community ‘has in common’? Community as Good: The Origins of Virtual Community The term ‘community’ suggests communication; indeed, the work derives from the Latin communicare, which, as Peter Gould explains, ‘originally meant to share, to join and to unite” (3), and from which is also derived the verb ‘to communicate.’ Hence, accounts of online culture draw on this definition of community, suggesting that computer technology brings people together by allowing them to communicate. Such proximity is, therefore, privileged over geophysical location. In recent debates about cyber-culture, definitions of online community tend to define community through the concept of ‘shared interests’. What is more, some accounts of cyber-culture share a certain view of online community as inherently liberating. The Bad Community: God Hates Fags God Hates Fags is perhaps one of the best-known far-right sites on the Web. It is a non-interactive website, set up and maintained by Benjamin Phelps, pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, in association with his grandfather Fred Phelps, who originally founded the church in 1964. Phelps first achieved notoriety in 1991 when he organised a picket of the San Francisco Pride Parade, to ‘warn this evil city that they’re going the way of Sodom’. In 1997, the church’s members were ordered by the American Supreme Court to limit their picketing activities after they targeted a local Episcopalian church that they claimed had promoted gay rights. Since the ruling, church members have continued their campaign of homophobic picketing. However, it is as an online promoter of homophobia and other forms of hatred that Phelps has achieved notoriety on an international scale. On paper, Westboro Baptist Church’s Website seems like the perfect example of the Net’s utility as a means of giving voice to small, marginalised community groups, and of bringing together people who share ‘a commonality of interests and goals’. However, this, like other Christian fundamentalist sites, challenges the view of such networks as essentially liberating (though they are certainly utopian in tone), since their shared interests happen to include insisting that creationist dogma be taught in schools, picketing the funerals of those who die of Aids or as a result of homophobic attacks, and promoting violence against lesbians and gay men. God Hates Fags sees itself as both a site of community and as a pressure group fighting a desperately immoral liberal society. It also draws on the idea of a society becoming good through the erasure of certain marginalised subjects, with the erasure to take the form of individuals suppressing their sexual identity in real life, not just online. While God Hates Fags and other sites like it primarily express the fantasy of a post-apocalyptic New Jerusalem. They do so by referring to fantasies of the nation (as a space that must be purified in order for this apocalyptic transformation to take place), of the online community (here imagined as a community of haters), and of the local community producing the site (who, far from being a small, marginal force, are re-presented as a community of ‘knowers’ attempting to promote ‘the truth’ about life in the United States: that is, as a force for good). Fantastic communities are often unaware of their own violence, and the community that hates is no exception, although its claims to peacefulness often stretch credulity to a greater than usual extent. Here is Westboro’s description of its ‘peaceful’ protests: WBC engages in daily peaceful sidewalk demonstrations opposing the homosexual lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth. We display large, colourful signs containing Bible words and sentiments, including: GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, GOD IS NOT MOCKED, FAGS ARE NATURE FREAKS [sic] … FAGS DOOM NATIONS, etc. (God Hates Fags) The site’s authors are able to claim such sentiments as ‘non-violent’ precisely because of the way that violence is imagined purely in terms of the physical act; that is, as embodied. Discursive violence, the violence of the text, is not recognised as such. Reading the passages above, I find it hard to maintain any sense of critical distance at the notion of picketing a funeral, and then going online to publicise the activity and exhort others to do the same. The site is frustrating precisely because it assumes the reader’s sympathy. For Phelps, a community of ‘fag haters’ already exists within the wider, corrupt national community of the United States; the site merely serves to unite this community and to provide it with resources. Nevertheless, the statement is itself part of the process by which the site attempts to construct a community through a process of rehabilitation, which aims to re-position hatred of homosexuals both as a political position and as an identity position. The site assumes that the experience of hatred, like that of other extreme emotions, has been wrongly constructed as essentially private, even impossible to articulate. Phelps assures us that it is not, that our hatred (and the reader is always assumed to be on side; the site is never defensive in tone, and never attempts to address its critics) is shared by others. The community exists in the bodies of individuals; by making hatred public and visible, the community can finally become visible in the public domain. This site, and others like it, provide a chilling new perspective on the notion of ‘shared interests’ as a basis for community, as well as giving an insight into the ways in which inequalities might not only translate from geophysical into online communities but actually be heightened, not least by the liberal rhetoric of free speech in which the intended victims of such assaults are urged simply to ignore them, even as they are imposed an ever-increasing number of victims (Porter 234-5). In order to justify their attacks on outsiders, hate sites reproduce discourses of virtual community alongside fundamentalist dogma. So, for example, Westboro Baptist Church claims that it is necessary to draw together a community based on a shared homophobic response in order to protect the larger community of the nation from destruction. In order to construct the virtual community then, it is necessary to mobilise fantasies of the nation as it might be in an ideal world. The community does not simply represent the wider community of the United States; that is, it is not a ‘virtual America.’ Rather, it draws upon a fantasy of the nation as perfectible, and this fantasy assumes a desire to purify the nation by destroying or expelling strangers. Despite the dystopian violence of Phelps’s vision, however, I do not think it is enough to argue that such manifestations are simply an example of a medium with great potential for spiritual growth falling into the wrong hands. Margaret Wertheim seems to predict the use of the Internet to promote hatred when she writes that ‘[t]here is every potential, if we are not careful, for cyberspace to be less like Heaven, and more like Hell’ (298). This reading of virtual culture tends to normalise the idea of a utopian internet community, from which deviations occur only as the result of insufficient vigilance. What is more, the invocation of a group of right-thinking cyber-citizens—the ‘we’ who must be ‘careful’—reproduces the very liberal rhetoric which, as I have argued, tends to perpetuate, or at least obscure, power structures within online communities. Indeed, the notion of ‘the online community’ invoked here seems, ironically, to reproduce the notion of a single unlimited community which, if it is not conterminous with all mankind exactly, is certainly conterminous with all (responsible) users of the internet. As I have shown, it is by drawing on the notions of universality and redemption that underpin utopian theories of cyber-culture that Phelps is able to present his site as a site of community. I would suggest, then, that the notion of a community that has the potential to be good but is constantly under threat from deviant outsiders, is inadequate. Rather, it is necessary to pay attention to the ways in which utopian rhetoric might in itself play a role in reproducing inequalities that exist in society more generally, both online and off. References Gould, P. “Dynamic Structures of Geographic Space.” Collapsing Space and Time: Geographic Aspects of Communications and Information. Eds. S.D. Brunn and T.R. Leinbach. London: HarperCollins, 1991. 3-30. Porter, J.E. “Liberal Individualism and Internet Policy: A Communitarian Critique.” Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century Technologies. Eds. G.E. Hawisher and C.L. Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. HarperPerennial, 1993. 16 Oct. 2002 http://www.well.com/www/hlr/vcbook/index.html>. Wertheim, M. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. London: Virago Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ferreday, Debra. "Bad Communities: Virtual Community and Hate Speech." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/07-ferreday.php>. APA Style Ferreday, D. (Feb. 2005) "Bad Communities: Virtual Community and Hate Speech," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/07-ferreday.php>.

Introduction Many years ago, the moral fable of Pinocchio warned children about the evils of lying (Perella). This article explores how children are learning lie-related insights from genres of currently marketed polygraph-style “spy kits”, voice stress analysis apps, and electric shock-delivering games. These artifacts are emerging despite the fact that polygraphy and other lie detection approaches are restricted in use in certain business and community contexts, in part because of their dubious scientific support. However, lie detection devices are still applied in many real-life settings, often in critically important security, customs, and employment arenas (Bunn). A commonly accepted definition of the term “lie” is “a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief which the communicator considers to be untrue” (Vrij 15), which includes the use of lies in various gaming situations. Many children’s games involve some kind of deception, and mental privacy considerations are important in many social contexts (such as “keeping a poker face”). The dystopian scenario of children learning basic honesty notions through technologically-enabled lie detection games scripted by corporate developers presents frightening prospects. These lie detection toys and games impart important moral perspectives through technological and algorithmic means (including electrical shocks and online shaming) rather than through human modelling and teaching. They normalise and lessen the seriousness of lying by reducing it into a game. In this article I focus on United States and United Kingdom toys and games, but comparable lie detection approaches have permeated other nations and cultures. Alder characterises the US as having an “obsession” with lie detection devices (1), an enthusiasm increasingly shared with other nations. Playing with the Truth: Spy Kits, Voice Stress Apps, and Shocking Liar The often-frightening image of an individual strapped to sensors and hooked up to a polygraph is often found in movies, television shows, and social media (Littlefield). I construe the notion of “lie detection” as “the use of a physiological measurement apparatus with the explicit aim of identifying when someone is lying. This typically comes with specific protocols for questioning the subject, and the output is graphically represented” (Bergers 1). Some lie detection toys utilise autonomic or unintentionally-supplied input in their analyses (such as the vocal changes related to stress); with networked toys, the data can subsequently be utilised by third parties. These aspects raise questions concerning consent as well as the validity of the results. Developers are producing related artifacts that challenge the difference between truth and lies, such as robots that “lie” by giving children responses to questions based on the children’s analysed preferences rather than standard determinations of truth and falsity (Zhu). Early lie detection games for children include the 1961 Lie Detecto from Manning Manufacturing. The technologies involved are galvanometers that required a 9-volt battery to operate, and sensors strapped to the hands of the subjects. It was reportedly designed “for junior G-men”, with suggested test questions for subjects such as "Do you like school?" Its ratings included "Could Be" and "Big Whopper" (“TIME’s New Products”). Lie detection had also been projected as fertile ground for children’s own educational research ventures. For example, in 2016 the popular magazine Scientific American outlined how young people could conduct experiments as to whether cognitive load (such as working on complex puzzles) affects the subject’s galvanic input to lie detection devices (Science Buddies). However, the Science Buddies’ description of the proposed activity did not encourage children to question the validity of the device itself. In organisational and agency settings, polygraph-style strategies are generally labour-intensive, involving experts who set up and administer tests (Bunn). These resource-intensive aspects of polygraphs may make their use in games attractive to players who want theatrical scripts to act out particular roles. An example of a lie detection toy that models the polygraph is the currently marketed Discovery Kids’ Electronic Lie Detection Portable Spy Kit, in which children go through the procedures of attaching the polygraph’s sensors to a human subject (Granich). The roles of “spy” and “detective” are familiar ones in many children’s books and movies, so the artifacts involved fit readily into children’s narratives. However, the overall societal importance of what they are modelling may still be beyond children’s grasps. Users of the comparable spy kit Project MC2 are given the following characterisation of their lie detection device, designed for individuals aged 6 and older: When someone lies, his or her body often produces small reactions from being nervous or stressed. One of those reactions is a small release of sweat. That moisture increases the skin’s electrical conductivity, or galvanic skin response, and the lie detector reads it as a fib. That's why the lie detector’s clips go on the fingers, because there are lots of sweat glands in your hands. Product includes: Lie detector, disguised as a mint box with a hidden button to force a truth or lie. Equipped with indicator light and sounds. Neon-colored wires with finger clips. (“Project MC2”) Similar sorts of lie detection approaches (though more sophisticated) are currently being used in US military operations. For example, the US Army’s Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening Systems (PCASS) are handheld polygraphs designed for use in battle. Voice stress analysis systems for lie detection have been used for decades in business as well as medical and crime contexts. As described by Price, the US toy maker Hasbro distributes The Lie Detector Game, which “uses voice analysis to determine whether someone is lying”. In the box you’ll get a lie detector device and 64 cards with questions to answer as part of the gameplay … . If you tell the truth, or the device at least thinks you did, then you score a point. Lying loses you a point” (1). An assortment of smartphone apps with voice-stress analysis capabilities designed for lie detection are also widely available along with suggestions for their use in games (McQuarrie), providing yet another way for children to explore truth and deception in technologically-framed contexts. Lie detection devices for entertainment generally construe at least one of the participants in the toy’s or game’s operations as a “subject”. The Shocking Liar game openly entices users to construct the human game players as “victims”: The SHOCKING LIAR [sic] is a table top device that you strap your victim's hand to, delivering a small electric shock when it thinks a lie is being told… The lie detector evaluates the data and stores the information after each question giving an accumulation of data on the person being questioned. This means the more questions that you ask, the more information the lie detector has to evaluate... Place your hand onto the hand plate of the SHOCKING LIAR. If you tell the truth, you can move away from it safely and if you tell a direct lie or have given an unacceptable amount of half-truths, you will receive an electric shock. Children who use Shocking Liar are indeed led to assume that they can catch themselves or friends in dishonesty, but research justification for the Shocking Liar’s results is not available. The societal messages imparted by the toys to children (such as “this toy can determine whether you are lying”) make their impacts especially consequential. These toys and games extract from the subjects’ data various aspects of which the subjects may not have conscious control or even awareness. For instance, the pitch of the subject’s voice can be mined and subsequently given voice stress analysis, as in the previously described Hasbro game. From this “shadow” or autonomic input is developed an interpretation (however problematic) of the subjects’ mental state. The results of the analysis may eventually be processed consciously by subjects, either as polygraph readings or electrical shocks (as in Shocking Liar). The autonomic input involved is often known as “leakage” or “tells” (Ekman). Game playing with robots presents new lie detection venues. Children often react differently in robot-mediated interactions to truth and deception issues than they do with human beings (Pearson). Since the opportunities for child-robot interaction are increasing with the advent of companion robots, new contexts for lie detection games are emerging. Robots that present verbal feedback to children based on the child’s preferences over time, or that strategically withhold information, are being developed and marketed. Research on children’s responses to robots may provide clues as to how to make cognitive engineering and mental privacy invasions more acceptable. This raises serious concerns about children’s perceptions of the standings of robots as moral guides as well as gaming companions. For younger children who are just acquiring the notion of lying, the toys and games could extend the kinds of socialisation provided by their parents and guardians. As lie detection initiatives are taking on wide roles in everyday human interaction (such as educational cheating and employee credibility assessment), the integration of the approaches into children’s activities may serve to normalise the processes involved. Older children who already have some sense of what lying constitutes may find in the lie detection toys and games some insights as to how to become more effective as liars. Some parents may use these lie-detection toys in misguided attempts to determine whether their children are lying to them about something. Many toys and games are explicit in their lie detection and surveillance themes, with specific narratives relating to the societal roles of detectives and spies. Children become complicit in the societal functions of lie detection, rather than simply being subjects or audiences to them. Children’s toys and games are all about experimentation, and these lie detection artifacts are no different (Oravec 2000). Children are enabled through interactions with the toys and games to experiment with lying behavior and possibly explore certain aspects of their own mental lives as well as those of others. Children can learn how to modulate some of the external physiological signals that are often associated with lying, much in the way that individuals can alter various physiological responses with assistance of biofeedback technologies. Such efforts may be empowering in some senses but also increase the potential for confusion about truthfulness and lying. Use of the toys and games may support the emergence of psychopathic tendencies in which children exhibit antisocial and egocentric behavior along with a failure to learn about the consequences of their actions, in this case lying (Hermann). This situation is comparable to that of organisations that advertise training for how to “beat” or “outsmart” polygraphs, efforts that have often confounded law enforcement and intelligence agencies (Rosky). Playing with the Truth: Children and Honesty The constructions of lie detection events that are fostered in these toys and games generally simplify and mechanise truth-lie differences, and often present them in an unquestioning manner. Children are not encouraged to wonder whether the devices are indeed functioning as stated in the instructions and advertising materials. Failure to inform children about the toys’ intents and to request their consent about lie detection could also challenge some of them to attempt to subvert the toys’ mechanisms. However, many lie detection toys and games provide the opportunity for historically grounded lessons for children about the detection and surveillance strategies of other eras, if introduced in a critical and context-sensitive manner. The assumption that effective lie detection is possible and mental privacy is thus limited is reinforced by the framings of many of these toys and games (Oravec “Emergence”). Lying is indeed a reflection of “Theory of Mind” which enables us to imagine the minds of others, and children are given an arena for exploration on this theme. However, children also learn that their mental worlds and streams of consciousness are readily accessible by others with the use of certain technologies. Scientific justification for the use of polygraphs through the past decades has yielded problematic results, although polygraphs and many other lie detection technologies have still retained social acceptability apparently related to their cultural appeal (Paul, Fischer, and Voigt). Many voice stress apps are also not reliable according to recent research (Tyrsina). The normalisation of current and projected systems for lie detection and mental privacy incursions presents unsettling prospects for children’s development, and the designers and disseminators of toys and games need to consider these dimensions. Using technologically enhanced games, toys, or robots to detect “lies” rather than engaging more directly with other humans in a game context may have unfortunate overall outcomes. For example, the ability to practice various schemes to evade detection while lying may be an attractive aspect of these toys and games to some individuals. The kinds of input often linked with lying behaviors (or “leakage”) can include physiological changes in voice qualities that are generally not directly controllable by the speaker without specific practice; the games and toys provide such practice venues. Individuals who are able to disconnect from their autonomic expressions and lie without physical or acoustic signs can exacerbate personality issues and social pathologies. Some may become psychopaths, who lie to get their way and tend not to feel remorseful, with the games and toys potentially exacerbating genetic tendencies; others may become pathological liars, who lie regardless of whether there is specific benefit to them in doing so (Vrij). Some of these toy-related spying and detective activities can unfortunately be at the expense of others’ wellbeing, whatever their impacts on the children directly involved as players. For example, some forms of lie detection technologies incorporate the remote collection of data without notification of participants, as in the voice-analysis systems just described. Children’s curiosity about others’ thoughts and mental lives may be at the root of such initiatives, though children can also utilise them for bullying and other forms of aggressive behavior. Some research shows that early lie telling by children is often linked with self-defense as they attempt to save face, but other research couples it with anti-social action and behavioral problems (Lavoie). However, adults have been shown to have some considerable influence on children in their lie-telling conduct (Dykstra, Willoughby, and Evans), so there is hope that parents, guardians, teachers, and concerned community members can have some positive influence. Reflections and Conclusions: The “New Pinocchio”? Toys and games can indeed project comforting and nurturing imageries for children. However, they can also challenge individuals to think differently about themselves and others, and even present dystopian scenarios. For toy and game developers to promote lie detection technologies can be problematic because of the associations of lying with antisocial activity and behavioral problems as well as moral concerns. The characters that children play in roles of spies and lie detector administrators supply them with powerful narratives and impact on their mental concepts. The significance of truth-telling in children’s lives is expanding as societal attention to credibility issues increases. For example, children are often called on to present evidence during divorce proceedings and abuse-related cases, so there is a significant body of research about children’s verbal truth and deception patterns (Talwar, Lavoie, and Crossman). The data collected by some networked lie detection toys (such as voice stress analysers) can subsequently be used by third-parties for marketing purposes or direct surveillance, raising critical questions about consent (Oravec “Emergence”). Future entertainment modes may soon be developed with lie detection approaches comparable to the ones I discuss in this article, since many games rely on some form of mental privacy assumptions. Games often have some aspect of personal cognitive control at their roots, with the assumption that individuals can shield their own deliberations from other players at least to some extent. Technological capabilities for lie detection can alter the kinds of strategies involved in games. For example, if players know the quality of other players’ poker hands through technological means, games would need to be restructured substantially, with speed of response or other aspects at a premium. The current and future toy and game developments just discussed underscore the continuing need for ethical and professional vigilance on the part of researchers and developers as they choose projects to work on and technologies to bring to market. Children and young people who play with lie detection and surveillance-related artifacts are being exposed to assumptions about how their own consciousness functions and how they can best navigate in the world through truth-telling or lying. Although children once acquired insights about lying though moral fables like Pinocchio, they are now learning from corporate-developed technological toys and games. References Alder, Ken. The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession. Simon and Schuster, 2007. Bergers, Lara. “Only in America? A History of Lie Detection in the Netherlands in Comparative Perspective, ca. 1910–1980.” The Netherlands: Utrecht U, 2018. <https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/30502>. Bunn, Geoffrey C. The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Dykstra, Victoria, Teena Willoughby, and Angela D. Evans. "Perceptions of Dishonesty: Understanding Parents’ Reports of and Influence on Children and Adolescents’ Lie-Telling." Journal of Youth and Adolescence 49 (2020): 49–59. <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01153-5>. Ekman, Paul. Telling Lies. New York: Norton, 1985. Granich, Mike. “17 Spy Gadgets and Spy Gear for Kids to Gift This Year.” Technolocheese, 2020. 14 Feb. 2020 <https://www.technolocheese.com/spy-gear-for-kids/>. Hermann, Henry. Dominance and Aggression in Humans and Other Animals: The Great Game of Life. Elsevier, 2017. Lavoie, Jennifer, et al. "Lie-telling as a Mode of Antisocial Action: Children’s Lies and Behavior Problems." Journal of Moral Education 47.4 (2018): 432–450. <https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2017.1405343>. Littlefield, Melissa. The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction. U of Michigan P, 2011. McQuarrie, Laura. “Hasbro's Lie Detector Game Uses Voice Analysis to Pick Up on Untruths.” Trendhunter, 2019. <https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/lie-detector-game>. Oravec, Jo Ann. "Interactive Toys and Children's Education: Strategies for Educators and Parents." Childhood Education 77.2 (2000): 81-85. ———. "The Emergence of 'Truth Machines'? Artificial Intelligence Approaches to Lie Detection." Ethics and Information Technology 24.6 (2022). <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-022-09621-6>. Paul, Bettina, Larissa Fischer, and Torsten Voigt. “Anachronistic Progress? User Notions of Lie Detection in the Juridical Field.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020): 328–346. <https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.433>. Pearson, Yvette. "Child-Robot Interaction: What Concerns about Privacy and Well-Being Arise When Children Play with, Use, and Learn from Robots?" 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On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. References ABC News. “Terrorist Videogame?” Nightline Online. 21 June 2006. 22 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2105341>. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Game Politics. “Was Congress Misled by ‘Terrorist’ Game Video? We Talk to Gamer Who Created the Footage.” 11 May 2006. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html#cutid1>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. julieb. “David Morgan Is a Horrible Writer and Should Be Fired.” Online posting. 5 May 2006. Dvorak Uncensored Cage Match Forums. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html>. Mahmood. “Terrorists Don’t Recruit with Battlefield 2.” GGL Global Gaming. 16 May 2006 http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3090>. Morgan, David. “Islamists Using U.S. Video Games in Youth Appeal.” Reuters online news service. 4 May 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=topNews &storyID=2006-05-04T215543Z_01_N04305973_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY- VIDEOGAMES.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc= NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2>. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Parker, Trey. Online posting. 7 May 2006. 9 May 2006 http://www.treyparker.com>. Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Shrader, Katherine. “Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites.” Associated Press 4 May 2006. SonicJihad. “SonicJihad: A Day in the Life of a Resistance Fighter.” Online posting. 26 Dec. 2005. Planet Battlefield Forums. 9 May 2006 http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=13670&tid=1806909&p=1>. Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.

Does science have a moral component? Today, as well as in the past, the perspectives of scientists diverge. Some scientists join political groups and work for them. They only care about financial benefits and waiving moral and ethical rules. Others take an alienated stance, arguing that science only has scientific objectives that must be addressed. They lack concern for ethical aspects and stand by the motto “science for the sake of science.” Others say it is important to have ethical rules in science and that we cannot preserve humankind and its movement towards the future without ethical and moral principles. Considering that the world is currently in the second decade of the 21st century, it is evident that it has been divided into two distinct axes: the first being democracy, with its significance to every human life, and the second being dictatorship and tyranny, where human life is deemed worthless in pursuit of a particular objective. Ukraine has become the first outpost of this division and an example for humankind, where moral and ethical rules serve as the foundation of its statehood, which it has been defending in the cruel war with the Moscow nuclear empire since 2014. Ukraine, through its centuries-old sacrifices and historical experience, has enlightened humanity with the authentic foundations of morality: the heroism of its defenders, the fervent patriotism of its people, spiritual principles, empathy, saving people and animals, aiding the needy, the volunteer movement, the humane treatment of prisoners of war, and adherence to international legal principles. Our main goal is to protect our personal freedom, which is vital for every scientist to be self-fulfilled. What is the distinction in morality/ethics between homo sovieticus and a doctor? The Hippocratic Oath has been a moral compass for all doctors for several millennia. Its essence has not changed. The Soviet government abolished the Hippocratic Oath in 1917 because it prevented their political objective of enslaving the population [1]. The Bolsheviks imposed a new healthcare system through a decree: they legalized abortions in 1920 and active euthanasia (by medical professionals) in 1922 [1,2]. The Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada reinstated the Hippocratic Oath in 1971. Called “The Oath of the Soviet Doctor,” it was meant to raise the doctor’s prestige and emphasize their duty before the Soviet state [3]. The decline of medical ethics in the Russian Federation also saw the abandonment of ancient traditions focused on the patient in the principles of medical practitioners’ activities and the continued functioning as a tool of the ruling government [4]. The oath of Russian physicians, with its patronizing and sexist language, completely disregards the rights of the patient and the physician’s responsibility to take preventive measures and fulfill their duties before society. The expert in medical ethics, Pellegrino, observed, “It’s hard to imagine a more devastating mutilation of the body of medical ethics.” The re-emergence of pre-existing medical behavior patterns, which were rooted in the Ukrainian environment and influenced by Greek-Catholic customs prior to the Soviet era, was observed with the declaration of Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Professor Bohdan Nadraha was a strong supporter of the creation of updated medical ethics [5]. As one of the initiators of the revival of the Ukrainian Medical Society in Lviv and as the head of the Court of Medical Honor from 1992 to 1996, he firmly advocated for the reinstatement of bioethical principles among physicians and their practice in accordance with the principles of Hippocrates. Professor Ihor Herych created a document called “The Hippocratic Oath of the Doctor”, and Lviv Regional Medical Administration officially accepted it in 2007 [6]. Article 81 describes the ethical behavior of a doctor, including the doctor’s attitude towards the patient, the quality of medical care, confidentiality, the doctor’s role in end-of-life care, transplantation issues, conducting clinical trials, patient’s informed consent, and responsibility of doctors before the society. During a meeting with members of the Medical Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the Ukrainian Medical Society in Lviv, His Beatitude Liubomyr Husar addressed the physicians regarding the observance of the Hippocratic Oath, “In my opinion, it is imperative to comprehend that medicine is not merely a profession, but a calling, regardless of the form of oath.” He further stated that “understanding the significance of one’s profession and performing it with the utmost diligence is essential” [7]. The doctor has a calling that obliges them to do everything possible for the patient’s benefit. His important advice on de-communization was, “Corruption is part of the Soviet legacy. In my perspective, it is imperative that the authorities, scientists, historians, and every member of society analyze the legacy of the Soviet era and the remaining negative elements and swiftly eradicate these undesirable elements” [8]. Ukrainian scientists have a lot to be proud of because they started the foundations back in the 19th century when they founded the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv in 1873 with support from philanthropists from Naddniprianshchyna. The Ukrainian intelligentsia and academics united and forged a solid foundation for the ethical values they pursued, embracing the ideals of liberty and tolerance being stuck among the two empires – the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the oppressive autocratic Russian Empire. This Society experienced significant development under the leadership of academician Mykhailo Hrushevskyi. The medical commission was established and supervised by Yevhen Ozarkevych, a prominent public figure, scientist, and physician, in 1898. As a global Ukrainian multidisciplinary academy of sciences, the medical commission has given impetus to the development of various directions of Ukrainian science, culture, and language and became the intellectual foundation of the Ukrainian state in 1918. The Shevchenko Scientific Society operated in Poland until 1939 and was destroyed by the Soviet authorities. In 1989, the Ukrainian diaspora recommenced its operations in Ukraine. The active intellectual diaspora, with its centers in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia, has been operational for 50 years (working outside Ukraine). So, we have a story about moral scientists who lived and worked for their country and the world [9]. Doctors and scientists who were forced to emigrate continued the traditions of the Lviv Ukrainian Medical Society and the Shevchenko Scientific Society during the 46 years of communist rule in western Ukraine. They started the Ukrainian Medical Society of North America in 1950 and published their works in the world’s only medical journal, “Medical Herald” (1954). Roman Osinchuk, who graduated from Lviv University and emigrated to New York in 1947, was its Editor-in-Chief. The basis of their activities were moral and ethical principles. Pavlo Dzhul, who edited the “Medical Herald” from 1967 to 2003, said it was better to follow the rules of medical ethics and follow the Hippocratic Oath instead of making a new code of ethics. “Hippocrates, in his oath, called for the honest fulfillment of duties according to one’s abilities and knowledge... a physician should alleviate the suffering of the sick and preserve human life... should lead a pure and blameless life, be committed to their profession to the fullest, and stay far from all that is malicious, unjust, and harmful. The aforementioned adage “primum non nocere” ought to remain relevant throughout time. A doctor who adheres to these principles will be able to fulfill their duties with a clear conscience, even during times of great revolutionary breakthroughs in medicine. Therefore, there is no need to draft a new code of medical ethics, but rather to reaffirm the ideals of our forefathers” [10]. In modern times, Ukraine is again fighting for the eternal principles of morality against the essence of the Russian Federation distorted by Soviet narratives and other dictatorial regimes. The democratic world underestimated the threats of dictatorial and terrorist regimes. Aggressors use economic and informational methods to manipulate people with a false ideology. They shape their supporters into “biomass” and instill in them a hidden “dark” morality also involving their religions. This is the second year that Ukraine is experiencing war particularly painfully, and this was also demonstrated during the attack on Israel. How methodically and uniformly the dictator-terrorist regimes operate! What a treachery, deceit, and cruelty! Someone teaches well, and executors learn quickly! The world must arrive at lucid and expeditious conclusions, as this poses a serious threat to the democratic principles of humanity. Joe Biden spoke about it in his special address from the White House on October 19, 2023: “We’re facing an inflection point in history... those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future... History has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction... making sure Israel and Ukraine succeed is vital for America’s national security... global democracy” [11]. Everyone should reflect on these words, especially the intellectual elite. Scientists worldwide need to know which direction they are moving in by using their knowledge, abilities, and work. The everyday work and moral decisions made by scientists represent the symbolic placement of weights on various platforms of the historical scales: either for democracy or for dictatorship. They are two components of the real world today. What prevails now will be our future! This is a challenging question for scientists living in dictatorial states. They either have to leave them or refrain from supporting the development of these societies by speaking at international congresses or publishing articles about their developments in scientific journals. It is imperative that they wait for better times, refrain from supporting and sustaining the dictatorship, and refrain from contributing to its perpetuation. Living in a country that routinely commits mass genocide against other nations, commits humanitarian and ecological crimes, kills children and prisoners of war, and demolishes churches, museums, hospitals, educational institutions, and cemeteries was not a lucky break for them. Hence, scientists in democratic societies must clearly define their objectives: are they engaged in genuine scientific research with a moral component and generating a perspective for humanity, or are they focusing on the financial aspect and inviting scientists from dictatorial regimes to international conferences and publishing their articles in reputable journals in exchange for financial support? Scientists from the Russian Federation are not victims, and the world must refrain from using the term “good” Russians. They are the representatives of a terrorist state, and they must be isolated during the war to enable their minds and conscience to comprehend the significance of human life [9]. The ethical oversight of scientific endeavors, viewed as a vital necessity, is a crucial prerequisite for the advancement of research and the existence of humankind in its entirety. Every scientist should be aware of their responsibility for the fate of humanity. True science must have a moral face! The war is a test to see how well the Ukrainian people believe in morals and science. Ukrainian scientists have taken a stand to defend their state, democracy, and freedom despite the circumstances of war by establishing an intellectual front [10]. Some scientists volunteered and sacrificed their lives for the democratic future of Ukraine and humankind. More than 80 scientists died in 2022-2023. Some scientists help the Armed Forces of Ukraine with their developments [11], and others save wounded Heroes [12]. We thank the scientists of Europe, America, Canada, and Australia who have supported and continue to support Ukraine [13,14], who do not create a platform for the propaganda of Russian science, and who do not invite Russian scientists to their professional congresses and conferences. Ferenc Krausz, the Hungarian Nobel Prize laureate in physics, donated his prize money to help Ukraine, which, contrary to the official policy of the Hungarian government in the international arena, has become an example of morality. Yet many scholars advocate the principle of neutrality and the grey zone. Many scientific conferences and professional gatherings don’t mention the war in Europe, they allow scientists from the Russian Federation to speak and moderate, and they don’t commemorate peaceful researchers who perished because of the war. This is what happened at an international conference organized by the European Society for Primary Immunodeficiency in Gothenburg on April 16-18, 2022. The professional community did not honor the memory of Oksana Leontiieva, a scientist and hematologist from Kyiv who was supposed to talk at this conference about her developments in transplanting primary immunodeficiency on October 17. On October 10, 2022, seven days before the scheduled speech, she was killed by a Russian bomb while en route to work. At that time, Russian scientists were actively delivering their speeches at the conference. Haven’t scientists around the world had enough of the horrible things happening in Europe, like Russian bombings of hospitals, schools, libraries, theaters, homes, cafés, and funerals? Aren’t they equated to the high crimes of war, genocide, and terrorism? Several independent organizations cited in the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights report for May 2022 established this. The report also concludes that “states have a legal obligation to prevent genocide beyond their borders when they become aware of a serious risk of genocide”. The threshold established by this report has been reached, and states are no longer allowed to deny it. For the past two years, there have been discussions about whether Western publications should refuse to publish scientific papers from Russian institutions. Only the Journal of Molecular Structure has issued a clear statement based on the humanitarian crisis arising from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ceasing the acceptance of manuscripts from scientists working in institutions of the Russian Federation [15]. Several journals declined to endorse a boycott for the sake of “universal science” (The British Medical Journal) [16] or to prevent “dividing the global research community and inhibiting the exchange of scientific knowledge” (Nature) [17]. Science has also decided not to boycott Russian submissions [18]. The “Journal of Hematopathology” has emerged as a prominent publication among Springer Nature’s journals, expressing its condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while retaining a proactive approach towards evaluating manuscripts from Russian authors [19]. The war in Ukraine is condemned in several publications [20-21]. This is an example of outrage without real action. Russians are not even denied electronic access to scientific publications. Did these publications accept manuscripts from the Nazi regime during World War II or the Soviet regime during the Cold War era? When asked if American universities should have boycotted German/Nazi universities during World War II, they answered, “...when the Nazis criminalized higher education, they ceased to be universities” [22]. The united comprehensive approach of the civilized world, scientists in the first place, was able to defeat fascism and collapse the Soviet Union. Scientists all over the world are now deeply concerned about the Russian Federation’s actions in Ukraine. You learn nothing from history! Scientists from the Russian Federation supported the war with Ukraine during its early days, and many of them continue supporting it. The Russian Federation has criminalized its own research institutes and universities through its stringent regulations that suppress free speech and, consequently, academic freedom. Research institutions operate for the war machine in three shifts. Russian scientists are essential supporters of government policy. For example, about one million Russian scientists left the country in protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who stayed don’t have enough important lab supplies from the West because of sanctions or reduced national funding for science [23]. But now is not the time for them to create the conditions for the development of science. Supporting them is a threat of the third world war! The manuscripts of Russian scientists with Homo sovieticus origins deserve to be boycotted by Western scientific publications until the war ends, with the complete withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, the reparations for the killed population, registered justice and convicted war crimes, restoration of the destroyed infrastructure; mitigating the environmental catastrophe in the Ukrainian territory due to widespread mining, dam explosion, etc. During wartime, international sanctions in the realm of science should be imposed, much like those for economic, sporting, and cultural spheres. For humankind to have perspective, isolation of the aggressor must function in the scientific field. Scientists should make a conscious decision regarding the purpose for which they live, work, think, and create. Think before the nuclear monster destroys the planet!!!

Introduction Darkness is often characterised as something that warrants heightened caution and scrutiny – signifying increased danger and risk. Within settler-colonial settings such as Australia, cautionary and negative connotations of darkness are projected upon Black people and their bodies, forming part of continuing colonial regimes of power (Moreton-Robinson). Negative stereotypes of “dark” continues to racialise all Indigenous peoples. In Australia, Indigenous peoples are both Indigenous and Black regardless of skin colour, and this plays out in a range of ways, some of which will be highlighted within this article. This article demonstrates that for Indigenous peoples, associations of fear and danger are built into the structural mechanisms that shape and maintain colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples and their bodies. It is this embodied form of darkness, and its negative connotations, and responses that we explore further. Figure 1: Megan Cope’s ‘I’m not afraid of the Dark’ t-shirt (Fredericks and Heemsbergen 2021) Responding to the anxieties and fears of settlers that often surround Indigenous peoples, Quandamooka artist and member of the art collective ProppaNow, Megan Cope, has produced a range of t-shirts, one of which declares “I’m not afraid of the Dark” (fig. 1). The wording ‘reflects White Australia’s fear of blackness’ (Dark + Dangerous). Exploring race relations through the theme of “darkness”, we begin by discussing how negative connotations of darkness are represented through everyday lexicons and how efforts to shift prejudicial and racist language are often met with defensiveness and resistance. We then consider how fears towards the dark translate into everyday practices, reinforced by media representations. The article considers how stereotype, conjecture, and prejudice is inflicted upon Indigenous people and reflects white settler fears and anxieties, rooting colonialism in everyday language, action, and norms. The Language of Fear Indigenous people and others with dark skin tones are often presented as having a proclivity towards threatening, aggressive, deceitful, and negative behaviours. This works to inform how Indigenous peoples are “known” and responded to by hegemonic (predominantly white) populations. Negative connotations of Indigenous people are a means of reinforcing and legitimising the falsity that European knowledge systems, norms, and social structures are superior whilst denying the contextual colonial circumstances that have led to white dominance. In Australia, such denial corresponds to the refusal to engage with the unceded sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples or acknowledge Indigenous resistance. Language is integral to the ways in which dominant populations come to “know” and present the so-called “Other”. Such language is reflected in digital media, which both produce and maintain white anxieties towards race and ethnicity. When part of mainstream vernacular, racialised language – and the value judgments associated with it – often remains in what Moreton-Robinson describes as “invisible regimes of power” (75). Everyday social structures, actions, and habits of thought veil oppressive and discriminatory attitudes that exist under the guise of “normality”. Colonisation and the dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing, being, and doing has fixated itself on creating a normality that associates Indigeneity and darkness with negative and threatening connotations. In doing so, it reinforces power balances that presents an image of white superiority built on the invalidation of Indigeneity and Blackness. White fears and anxieties towards race made explicit through social and digital media are also manifest via subtle but equally pervasive everyday action (Carlson and Frazer; Matamoros-Fernández). Confronting and negotiating such fears becomes a daily reality for many Indigenous people. During the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, which extended to Australia and were linked to deaths in custody and police violence, African American poet Saul Williams reminded his followers of the power of language in constructing racialised fears (saulwilliams). In an Instagram post, Williams draws back the veil of an uncontested normality to ask that we take personal responsibility over the words we use. He writes: here’s a tip: Take the words DARK or BLACK in connection to bad, evil, ominous or scary events out of your vocabulary. We learn the stock market crashed on Black Monday, we read headlines that purport “Dark Days Ahead”. There’s “dark” or “black” humour which implies an undertone of evil, and then there are people like me who grow up with dark skin having to make sense of the English/American lexicon and its history of “fair complexions” – where “fair” can mean “light; blond.” OR “in accordance with rules or standards; legitimate.” We may not be fully responsible for the duplicitous evolution of language and subtle morphing of inherited beliefs into description yet we are in full command of the words we choose even as they reveal the questions we’ve left unasked. Like the work of Moreton-Robinson and other scholars, Williams implores his followers to take a reflexive position to consider the questions often left unasked. In doing so, he calls for the transcendence of anonymity and engagement with the realities of colonisation – no matter how ugly, confronting, and complicit one may be in its continuation. In the Australian context this means confronting how terms such as “dark”, “darkie”, or “darky” were historically used as derogatory and offensive slurs for Aboriginal peoples. Such language continues to be used today and can be found in the comment sections of social media, online news platforms, and other online forums (Carlson “Love and Hate”). Taking the move to execute personal accountability can be difficult. It can destabilise and reframe the ways in which we understand and interact with the world (Rose 22). For some, however, exposing racism and seemingly mundane aspects of society is taken as a personal attack which is often met with reactionary responses where one remains closed to new insights (Whittaker). This feeds into fears and anxieties pertaining to the perceived loss of power. These fears and anxieties continue to surface through conversations and calls for action on issues such as changing the date of Australia Day, the racialised reporting of news (McQuire), removing of plaques and statues known to be racist, and requests to change placenames and the names of products. For example, in 2020, Australian cheese producer Saputo Dairy Australia changed the name of it is popular brand “Coon” to “Cheer Tasty”. The decision followed a lengthy campaign led by Dr Stephen Hagan who called for the rebranding based on the Coon brand having racist connotations (ABC). The term has its racist origins in the United States and has long been used as a slur against people with dark skin, liking them to racoons and their tendency to steal and deceive. The term “Coon” is used in Australia by settlers as a racist term for referring to Aboriginal peoples. Claims that the name change is example of political correctness gone astray fail to acknowledge and empathise with the lived experience of being treated as if one is dirty, lazy, deceitful, or untrustworthy. Other brand names have also historically utilised racist wording along with imagery in their advertising (Conor). Pear’s soap for example is well-known for its historical use of racist words and imagery to legitimise white rule over Indigenous colonies, including in Australia (Jackson). Like most racial epithets, the power of language lies in how the words reflect and translate into actions that dehumanise others. The words we use matter. The everyday “ordinary” world, including online, is deeply politicised (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”) and comes to reflect attitudes and power imbalances that encourage white people to internalise the falsity that they are superior and should have control over Black people (Conor). Decisions to make social change, such as that made by Saputo Dairy Australia, can manifest into further white anxieties via their ability to force the confrontation of the circumstances that continue to contribute to one’s own prosperity. In other words, to unveil the realities of colonialism and ask the questions that are too often left in the dark. Lived Experiences of Darkness Colonial anxieties and fears are driven by the fact that Black populations in many areas of the world are often characterised as criminals, perpetrators, threats, or nuisances, but are rarely seen as victims. In Australia, the repeated lack of police response and receptivity to concerns of Indigenous peoples expressed during the Black Lives Matter campaign saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets to protest. Protestors at the same time called for the end of police brutality towards Indigenous peoples and for an end to Indigenous deaths in custody. The protests were backed by a heavy online presence that sought to mobilise people in hope of lifting the veil that shrouds issues relating to systemic racism. There have been over 450 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to die in custody since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 (The Guardian). The tragedy of the Indigenous experience gains little attention internationally. The negative implications of being the object of white fear and anxiety are felt by Indigenous and other Black communities daily. The “safety signals” (Daniella Emanuel) adopted by white peoples in response to often irrational perceptions of threat signify how Indigenous and other Black peoples and communities are seen and valued by the hegemony. Memes played out in social media depicting “Karens” – a term that corresponds to caricaturised white women (but equally applicable to men) who exhibit behaviours of entitlement – have increasing been used in media to expose the prevalence of irrational racial fears (also see Wong). Police are commonly called on Indigenous people and other Black people for simply being within spaces such as shopping malls, street corners, parks, or other spaces in which they are considered not to belong (Mohdin). Digital media are also commonly envisioned as a space that is not natural or normal for Indigenous peoples, a notion that maintains narratives of so-called Indigenous primitivity (Carlson and Frazer). Media connotations of darkness as threatening are associated with, and strategically manipulated by, the images that accompany stories about Indigenous peoples and other Black peoples. Digital technologies play significant roles in producing and disseminating the images shown in the media. Moreover, they have a “role in mediating and amplifying old and new forms of abuse, hate, and discrimination” (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas). Daniels demonstrates how social media sites can be spaces “where race and racism play out in interesting, sometimes disturbing, ways” (702), shaping ongoing colonial fears and anxieties over Black peoples. Prominent footballer Adam Goodes, for example, faced a string of attacks after he publicly condemned racism when he was called an “Ape” by a spectator during a game celebrating Indigenous contributions to the sport (Coram and Hallinan). This was followed by a barrage of personal attacks, criticisms, and booing that spread over the remaining years of his football career. When Goodes performed a traditional war dance as a form of celebration during a game in 2015, many turned to social media to express their outrage over his “confrontational” and “aggressive” behaviour (Robinson). Goodes’s affirmation of his Indigeneity was seen by many as a threat to their own positionality and white sensibility. Social media were therefore used as a mechanism to control settler narratives and maintain colonial power structures by framing the conversation through a white lens (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”). Indigenous peoples in other highly visible fields have faced similar backlash. In 1993, Elaine George was the first Aboriginal person to feature on the cover of Vogue magazine, a decision considered “risky” at the time (Singer). The editor of Vogue later revealed that the cover was criticised by some who believed George’s skin tone was made to appear lighter than it actually was and that it had been digitally altered. The failure to accept a lighter skin colour as “Aboriginal” exposes a neglect to accept ethnicity and Blackness in all its diversity (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”; Carlson “Love and Hate”). Where Adam Goodes was criticised for his overt expression of Blackness, George was critisised for not being “black enough”. It was not until seventeen years later that another Aboriginal model, Samantha Harris, was featured on the cover of Vogue (Marks). While George inspired and pathed the way for those to come, Harris experienced similar discrimination within the industry and amongst the public (Carson and Ky). Singer Jessica Mauboy (in Hornery) also explains how her identity was managed by others. She recalls, I was pretty young when I first received recognition, and for years I felt as though I couldn't show my true identity. What I was saying in public was very dictated by other people who could not handle my sense of culture and identity. They felt they had to take it off my hands. Mauboy’s experience not only demonstrates how Blackness continues to be seen as something to “handle”, but also how power imbalances play out. Scholar Chelsea Watego offers numerous examples of how this occurs in different ways and arenas, for example through relationships between people and within workplaces. Bargallie’s scholarly work also provides an understanding of how Indigenous people experience racism within the Australian public service, and how it is maintained through the structures and systems of power. The media often represents communities with large Indigenous populations as being separatist and not contributing to wider society and problematic (McQuire). Violence, and the threat of violence, is often presented in media as being normalised. Recently there have been calls for an increased police presence in Alice Springs, NT, and other remotes communities due to ongoing threats of “tribal payback” and acts of “lawlessness” (Sky News Australia; Hildebrand). Goldberg uses the phrase “Super/Vision” to describe the ways that Black men and women in Black neighbourhoods are continuously and erroneously supervised and surveilled by police using apparatus such as helicopters and floodlights. Simone Browne demonstrates how contemporary surveillance practices are rooted in anti-black domination and are operationalised through a white gaze. Browne uses the term “racializing surveillance” to describe a ”technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’” (16). The outcome is often discriminatory treatment to those negatively racialised by such surveillance. Narratives that associate Indigenous peoples with darkness and danger fuel colonial fears and uphold the invisible regimes of power by instilling the perception that acts of surveillance and the restrictions imposed on Indigenous peoples’ autonomy are not only necessary but justified. Such myths fail to contextualise the historic colonial factors that drive segregation and enable a forgetting that negates personal accountability and complicity in maintaining colonial power imbalances (Riggs and Augoustinos). Inayatullah and Blaney (165) write that the “myth we construct calls attention to a darker, tragic side of our ethical engagement: the role of colonialism in constituting us as modern actors.” They call for personal accountability whereby one confronts the notion that we are both products and producers of a modernity rooted in a colonialism that maintains the misguided notion of white supremacy (Wolfe; Mignolo; Moreton-Robinson). When Indigenous and other Black peoples enter spaces that white populations don’t traditionally associate as being “natural” or “fitting” for them (whether residential, social, educational, a workplace, online, or otherwise), alienation, discrimination, and criminalisation often occurs (Bargallie; Mohdin; Linhares). Structural barriers are erected, prohibiting career or social advancement while making the space feel unwelcoming (Fredericks; Bargallie). In workplaces, Indigenous employees become the subject of hyper-surveillance through the supervision process (Bargallie), continuing to make them difficult work environments. This is despite businesses and organisations seeking to increase their Indigenous staff numbers, expressing their need to change, and implementing cultural competency training (Fredericks and Bargallie). As Barnwell correctly highlights, confronting white fears and anxieties must be the responsibility of white peoples. When feelings of shock or discomfort arise when in the company of Indigenous peoples, one must reflexively engage with the reasons behind this “fear of the dark” and consider that perhaps it is they who are self-segregating. Mohdin suggests that spaces highly populated by Black peoples are best thought of not as “black spaces” or “black communities”, but rather spaces where white peoples do not want to be. They stand as reminders of a failed colonial regime that sought to deny and dehumanise Indigenous peoples and cultures, as well as the continuation of Black resistance and sovereignty. Conclusion In working towards improving relationships between Black and white populations, the truths of colonisation, and its continuing pervasiveness in local and global settings must first be confronted. In this article we have discussed the association of darkness with instinctual fears and negative responses to the unknown. White populations need to reflexively engage and critique how they think, act, present, address racism, and respond to Indigenous peoples (Bargallie; Moreton-Robinson; Whittaker), cultivating a “decolonising consciousness” (Bradfield) to develop new habits of thinking and relating. To overcome fears of the dark, we must confront that which remains unknown, and the questions left unasked. This means exposing racism and power imbalances, developing meaningful relationships with Indigenous peoples, addressing structural change, and implementing alternative ways of knowing and doing. Only then may we begin to embody Megan Cope’s message, “I’m not afraid of the Dark”. Acknowledgements We thank Dr Debbie Bargallie for her feedback on our article, which strengthened the work. References ABC News. 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Al Gore brought climate change into … our living rooms. … The 2008 oil price hikes [and the global financial crisis] awakened the world to potential economic hardship in a rapidly urbanising world where the petrol-driven automobile is still king. (Mouritz 47) Six hundred million cars (Urry, “Climate Change” 265) traverse the world’s roads, or sit idly in garages and clogging city streets. The West’s economic progress has been built in part around the success of the automotive industry, where the private car rules the spaces and rhythms of daily life. The problem of “automobile dependence” (Newman and Kenworthy) is often cited as one of the biggest challenges facing countries attempting to combat anthropogenic climate change. Sociologist John Urry has claimed that automobility is an “entire culture” that has re-defined movement in the contemporary world (Urry Mobilities 133). As such, it is the single most significant environmental challenge “because of the intensity of resource use, the production of pollutants and the dominant culture which sustains the major discourses of what constitutes the good life” (Urry Sociology 57-8). Climate change has forced a re-thinking of not only how we produce and dispose of cars, but also how we use them. What might a society not dominated by the private, petrol-driven car look like? Some of the pre-eminent writers on climate change futures, such as Gwynne Dyer, James Lovelock and John Urry, discuss one possibility that might emerge when oil becomes scarce: societies will descend into civil chaos, “a Hobbesian war of all against all” where “regional warlordism” and the most brutish, barbaric aspects of human nature come to the fore (Urry, “Climate Change” 261). Discussing a post-car society, John Urry also proffers another scenario in his “sociologies of the future:” an Orwellian “digital panopticon” in which other modes of transport, far more suited to a networked society, might emerge on a large scale and, in the long run, “might tip the system” into post-car one before it is too late (Urry, “Climate Change” 261). Amongst the many options he discusses is car sharing. Since its introduction in Germany more than 30 years ago, most of the critical literature has been devoted to the planning, environmental and business innovation aspects of car sharing; however very little has been written on its cultural dimensions. This paper analyses this small but developing trend in many Western countries, but more specifically its emergence in Sydney. The convergence of climate change discourse with that of the global financial crisis has resulted in a focus in the mainstream media, over the last few months, on technologies and practices that might save us money and also help the environment. For instance, a Channel 10 News story in May 2009 focused on the boom in car sharing in Sydney (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=EPTT8vYVXro). Car sharing is an adaptive technology that doesn’t do away with the car altogether, but rather transforms the ways in which cars are used, thought about and promoted. I argue that car sharing provides a challenge to the dominant consumerist model of the privately owned car that has sustained capitalist structures for at least the last 50 years. In addition, through looking at some marketing and promotion tactics of car sharing in Australia, I examine some emerging car sharing subjectivities that both extend and subvert the long-established discourses of the automobile’s flexibility and autonomy to tempt monogamous car buyers into becoming philandering car sharers. Much literature has emerged over the last decade devoted to the ubiquitous phenomenon of automobility. “The car is the literal ‘iron cage’ of modernity, motorised, moving and domestic,” claims Urry (“Connections” 28). Over the course of twentieth century, automobility became “the dominant form of daily movement over much of the planet (dominating even those who do not move by cars)” (Paterson 132). Underpinning Urry’s prolific production of literature is his concept of automobility. This he defines as a complex system of “intersecting assemblages” that is not only about driving cars but the nexus between “production, consumption, machinic complexes, mobility, culture and environmental resource use” (Urry, “Connections” 28). In addition, Matthew Paterson, in his Automobile Politics, asserts that “automobility” should be viewed as everything that makes driving around in a car possible: highways, parking structures and traffic rules (87). While the private car seems an inevitable outcome of a capitalistic, individualistic modern society, much work has gone into the process of naturalising a dominant notion of automobility on drivers’ horizons. Through art, literature, popular music and brand advertising, the car has long been associated with seductive forms of identity, and societies have been built around a hegemonic culture of car ownership and driving as the pre-eminent, modern mode of self-expression. And more than 50 years of a popular Hollywood film genre—road movies—has been devoted to glorifying the car as total freedom, or in its more nihilistic version, “freedom on the road to nowhere” (Corrigan). As Paterson claims, “autonomous mobility of car driving is socially produced … by a range of interventions that have made it possible” (18). One of the main reasons automobility has been so successful, he claims, is through its ability to reproduce capitalist society. It provided a commodity around which a whole set of symbols, images and discourses could be constructed which served to effectively legitimise capitalist society. (30) Once the process is locked-in, it then becomes difficult to reverse as billions of agents have adapted to it and built their lives around “automobility’s strange mixture of co-ercion and flexibility” (Urry, “Climate Change” 266). The Decline of the Car Globally, the greatest recent rupture in the automobile’s meta-narrative of success came about in October 2008 when three CEOs from the major US car firms (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) begged the United States Senate for emergency loan funds to avoid going bankrupt. To put the economic significance of this into context, Emma Rothschild notes “when the listing of the ‘Fortune 500’ began in 1955, General Motors was the largest American corporation, and it was one of the three largest, measured in revenues, every year until 2007” (Rothschilds, “Can we transform”). Curiously, instead of focusing on the death of the car (industry), as we know it, that this scenario might inevitably herald, much of the media attention focused on the hypocrisy and environmental hubris of the fact that all the CEOs had flown in private luxury jets to Washington. “Couldn’t they have at least jet-pooled?” complained one Democrat Senator (Wutkowski). In their next visit to Washington, most of them drove up in experimental vehicles still in pre-production, including plug-in hybrids. Up until that point no other manufacturing industry had been bailed out in the current financial crisis. Of course it’s not the first time the automobile industries have been given government assistance. The Australian automotive industry has received on-going government subsidies since the 1980s. Most recently, PM Kevin Rudd granted a 6.2 billion dollar ‘green car’ package to Australian automotive manufacturers. His justification to the growing chorus of doubts about the economic legitimacy of such a move was: “Some might say it's not worth trying to have a car industry, that is not my view, it is not the view of the Australian government and it never will be the view of any government which I lead” (The Australian). Amongst the many reasons for the government support of these industries must include the extraordinary interweaving of discourses of nationhood and progress with the success of the car industry. As the last few months reveal, evidently the mantra still prevails of “what’s good for the country is good for GM and vice versa”, as the former CEO of General Motors, Charles “Engine” Wilson, argued back in 1952 (Hirsch). In post-industrial societies like Australia it’s not only the economic aspects of the automotive industries that are criticised. Cars seem to be slowly losing their grip on identity-formation that they managed to maintain throughout “the century of the car” (Gilroy). They are no longer unproblematically associated with progress, freedom, youthfulness and absolute autonomy. The decline and eventual death of the automobile as we know it will be long, arduous and drawn-out. But there are some signs of a post-automobile society emerging, perhaps where cars will still be used but they will not dominate our society, urban space and culture in quite the same way that they have over the last 50 years. Urry discusses six transformations that might ‘tip’ the hegemonic system of automobility into a post-car one. He mentions new fuel systems, new materials for car construction, the de-privatisation of cars, development of communications technologies and integration of networked public transport through smart card technology and systems (Urry, Mobilities 281-284). As Paterson and others have argued, computers and mobile phones have somehow become “more genuine symbols of mobility and in turn progress” than the car (157). As a result, much automobile advertising now intertwines communications technologies with brand to valorise mobility. Car sharing goes some way in not only de-privatising cars but also using smart card technology and networked systems enabling an association with mobility futures. In Automobile Politics Paterson asks, “Is the car fundamentally unsustainable? Can it be greened? Has the car been so naturalised on our mobile horizons that we can’t imagine a society without it?” (27). From a sustainability perspective, one of the biggest problems with cars is still the amount of space devoted to them; highways, garages, car parks. About one-quarter of the land in London and nearly one-half of that in Los Angeles is devoted to car-only environments (Urry, “Connections” 29). In Sydney, it is more like a quarter. We have to reduce the numbers of cars on our roads to make our societies livable (Newman and Kenworthy). Car sharing provokes a re-thinking of urban space. If one quarter of Sydney’s population car shared and we converted this space into green use or local market gardens, then we’d have a radically transformed city. Car sharing, not to be confused with ‘ride sharing’ or ‘car pooling,’ involves a number of people using cars that are parked centrally in dedicated car bays around the inner city. After becoming a member (much like a 6 or 12 monthly gym membership), the cars can be booked (and extended) by the hour via the web or phone. They can then be accessed via a smart card. In Sydney there are 3 car sharing organisations operating: Flexicar (http://www.flexicar.com.au/), CharterDrive (http://www.charterdrive.com.au/) and GoGet (http://www.goget.com.au/).[1] The largest of these, GoGet, has been operating for 6 years and has over 5000 members and 200 cars located predominantly in the inner city suburbs. Anecdotally, GoGet claims its membership is primarily drawn from professionals living in the inner-urban ring. Their motivation for joining is, firstly, the convenience that car sharing provides in a congested, public transport-challenged city like Sydney; secondly, the financial savings derived; and thirdly, members consider the environmental and social benefits axiomatic. [2] The promotion tactics of car sharing seems to reflect this by barely mentioning the environment but focusing on those aspects which link car sharing to futuristic and flexible subjectivities which I outline in the next section. Unlike traditional car rental, the vehicles in car sharing are scattered through local streets in a network allowing local residents and businesses access to the vehicles mostly on foot. One car share vehicle is used by 22-24 members and gets about seven cars off the street (Mehlman 22). With lots of different makes and models of vehicles in each of their fleets, Flexicar’s website claims, “around the corner, around the clock” “Flexicar offers you the freedom of driving your own car without the costs and hassles of owning one,” while GoGet asserts, “like owning a car only better.” Due to the initial lack of interest from government, all the car sharing organisations in Australia are privately owned. This is very different to the situation in Europe where governments grant considerable financial assistance and have often integrated car sharing into pre-existing public transport networks. Urry discusses the spread of car sharing across the Western world: Six hundred plus cities across Europe have developed car-sharing schemes involving 50,000 people (Cervero, 2001). Prototype examples are found such as Liselec in La Rochelle, and in northern California, Berlin and Japan (Motavalli, 2000: 233). In Deptford there is an on-site car pooling service organized by Avis attached to a new housing development, while in Jersey electric hire cars have been introduced by Toyota. (Urry, “Connections” 34) ‘Collaborative Consumption’ and Flexible, Philandering Subjectivities Car sharing shifts the dominant conception of a car from being a ‘commodity’, which people purchase and subsequently identify with, to a ‘service’ or network of vehicles that are collectively used. It does this through breaking down the one car = one person (or one family) ratio with one car instead servicing 20 or more people. One of Paterson’s biggest criticisms concerns car driving as “a form of social exclusion” (44). Car sharing goes some way in subverting the model of hyper-individualism that supports both hegemonic automobility and capitalist structures, whereby the private motorcar produces a “separation of individuals from one another driving in their own private universes with no account for anyone else” (Paterson 90). As a car sharer, the driver has to acknowledge that this is not their private domain, and the car no longer becomes an extension of their living room or bedroom, as is noted in much literature around car cultures (Morris, Sheller, Simpson). There are a community of people using the car, so the driver needs to be attentive to things like keeping the car clean and bringing it back on time so another person can use it. So while car sharing may change the affective relationship and self-identification with the vehicle itself, it doesn’t necessarily change the phenomenological dimensions of car driving, such as the nostalgic pleasure of driving on the open road, or perhaps more realistically in Sydney, the frustration of being caught in a traffic jam. However, the fact the driver doesn’t own the vehicle does alter their relationship to the space and the commodity in a literal as well as a figurative way. Like car ownership, evidently car sharing also produces its own set of limitations on freedom and convenience. That mobility and car ownership equals freedom—the ‘freedom to drive’—is one imaginary which car firms were able to successfully manipulate and perpetuate throughout the twentieth century. However, car sharing also attaches itself to the same discourses of freedom and pervasive individualism and then thwarts them. For instance, GoGet in Sydney have run numerous marketing campaigns that attempt to contest several ‘self-evident truths’ about automobility. One is flexibility. Flexibility (and associated convenience) was one thing that ownership of a car in the late twentieth century was firmly able to affiliate itself with. However, car ownership is now more often associated with being expensive, a hassle and a long-term commitment, through things like buying, licensing, service and maintenance, cleaning, fuelling, parking permits, etc. Cars have also long been linked with sexuality. When in the 1970s financial challenges to the car were coming as a result of the oil shocks, Chair of General Motors, James Roche stated that, “America’s romance with the car is not over. Instead it has blossomed into a marriage” (Rothschilds, Paradise Lost). In one marketing campaign GoGet asked, ‘Why buy a car when all you need is a one night stand?’, implying that owning a car is much like a monogamous relationship that engenders particular commitments and responsibilities, whereas car sharing can just be a ‘flirtation’ or a ‘one night stand’ and you don’t have to come back if you find it a hassle. Car sharing produces a philandering subjectivity that gives individuals the freedom to have lots of different types of cars, and therefore relationships with each of them: I can be a Mini Cooper driver one day and a Falcon driver the next. This disrupts the whole kind of identification with one type of car that ownership encourages. It also breaks down a stalwart of capitalism—brand loyalty to a particular make of car with models changing throughout a person’s lifetime. Car sharing engenders far more fluid types of subjectivities as opposed to those rigid identities associated with ownership of one car. Car sharing can also be regarded as part of an emerging phenomenon of what Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers have called “collaborative consumption”—when a community gets together “through organized sharing, swapping, bartering, trading, gifting and renting to get the same pleasures of ownership with reduced personal cost and burden, and lower environmental impact” (www.collaborativeconsumption.com). As Urry has stated, these developments indicate a gradual transformation in current economic structures from ownership to access, as shown more generally by many services offered and accessed via the web (Urry Mobilities 283). Rogers and Botsman maintain that this has come about through the “convergence of online social networks increasing cost consciousness and environmental necessity." In the future we could predict an increasing shift to payment to ‘access’ for mobility services, rather than the outright private ownerships of vehicles (Urry, “Connections”). Networked-Subjectivities or a ‘Digital Panopticon’? Cars, no longer able on their own to signify progress in either technical or social terms, attain their symbolic value through their connection to other, now more prevalently ‘progressive’ technologies. (Paterson 155) The term ‘digital panopticon’ has often been used to describe a dystopian world of virtual surveillance through such things as web-enabled social networking sites where much information is public, or alternatively, for example, the traffic surveillance system in London whereby the public can be constantly scrutinised through the centrally monitored cameras that track people’s/vehicle’s movements on city streets. In his “sociologies of the future,” Urry maintains that one thing which might save us from descending into post-car civil chaos is a system governed by a “digital panopticon” mobility system. This would be governed by a nexus system “that orders, regulates, tracks and relatively soon would ‘drive’ each vehicle and monitor each driver/passenger” (Urry, “Connections” 33). The transformation of mobile technologies over the last decade has made car sharing, as a viable business model, possible. Through car sharing’s exploitation of an online booking system, and cars that can be tracked, monitored and traced, the seeds of a mobile “networked-subjectivity” are emerging. But it’s not just the technology people are embracing; a cultural shift is occurring in the way that people understand mobility, their own subjectivity, and more importantly, the role of cars. NETT Magazine did a feature on car sharing, and advertised it on their front cover as “GoGet’s web and mobile challenge to car owners” (May 2009). Car sharing seems to be able to tap into more contemporary understandings of what mobility and flexibility might mean in the twenty-first century. In their marketing and promotion tactics, car sharing organisations often discursively exploit science fiction terminology and generate a subjectivity much more dependent on networks and accessibility (158). In the suburbs people park their cars in garages. In car sharing, the vehicles are parked not in car bays or car parks, but in publically accessible ‘pods’, which promotes a futuristic, sci-fi experience. Even the phenomenological dimensions of swiping a smart card over the front of the windscreen to open the car engender a transformation in access to the car, instead of through a key. This is service-technology of the future while those stuck in car ownership are from the old economy and the “century of the car” (Gilroy). The connections between car sharing and the mobile phone and other communications technologies are part of the notion of a networked, accessible vehicle. However, the more problematic side to this is the car under surveillance. Nic Lowe, of his car sharing organisation GoGet says, “Because you’re tagged on and we know it’s you, you are able to drive the car… every event you do is logged, so we know what time you turned the key, what time you turned it off and we know how far you drove … if a car is lost we can sound the horn to disable it remotely to prevent theft. We can track how fast you were going and even how fast you accelerated … track the kilometres for billing purposes and even find out when people are using the car when they shouldn’t be” (Mehlman 27). The possibility with the GPS technology installed in the car is being able to monitor speeds at which people drive, thereby fining then every minute spent going over the speed limit. While this conjures up the notion of the car under surveillance, it is also a much less bleaker scenario than “a Hobbesian war of all against all”. Conclusion: “Hundreds of Cars, No Garage” The prospect of climate change is provoking innovation at a whole range of levels, as well as providing a re-thinking of how we use taken-for-granted technologies. Sometime this century the one tonne, privately owned, petrol-driven car will become an artefact, much like Sydney trams did last century. At this point in time, car sharing can be regarded as an emerging transitional technology to a post-car society that provides a challenge to hegemonic automobile culture. It is evidently not a radical departure from the car’s vast machinic complex and still remains a part of what Urry calls the “system of automobility”. From a pro-car perspective, its networked surveillance places constraints on the free agency of the car, while for those of the deep green variety it is, no doubt, a compromise. Nevertheless, it provides a starting point for re-thinking the foundations of the privately-owned car. While Urry makes an important point in relation to a society moving from ownership to access, he doesn’t take into account the cultural shifts occurring that are enabling car sharing to be attractive to prospective members: the notion of networked subjectivities, the discursive constructs used to establish car sharing as a thing of the future with pods and smart cards instead of garages and keys. If car sharing became mainstream it could have radical environmental impacts on things like urban space and pollution, as well as the dominant culture of “automobile dependence” (Newman and Kenworthy), as Australia attempts to move to a low carbon economy. Notes [1] My partner Bruce Jeffreys, together with Nic Lowe, founded Newtown Car Share in 2002, which is now called GoGet. [2] Several layers down in the ‘About Us’ link on GoGet’s website is the following information about the environmental benefits of car sharing: “GoGet's aim is to provide a reliable, convenient and affordable transport service that: allows people to live car-free, decreases car usage, improves local air quality, removes private cars from local streets, increases patronage for public transport, allows people to lead more active lives” (http://www.goget.com.au/about-us.html). References The Australian. “Kevin Rudd Throws $6.2bn Lifeline to Car Industry.” 10 Nov. 2008. < http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/ 0,28124,24628026-5018011,00.html >.Corrigan, Tim. “Genre, Gender, and Hysteria: The Road Movie in Outer Space.” A Cinema Without Walls: Movies, Culture after Vietnam. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Dwyer, Gwynne. Climate Wars. North Carlton: Scribe, 2008. Featherstone, Mike. “Automobilities: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture and Society 21.4-5 (2004): 1-24. Gilroy, Paul. “Driving while Black.” Car Cultures. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Hirsch, Michael. “Barack the Saviour.” Newsweek 13 Nov. 2008. < http://www.newsweek.com/id/168867 >. Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. Penguin, 2007. Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Penguin, 2009. Mehlman, Josh. “Community Driven Success.” NETT Magazine (May 2009): 22-28. Morris, Meaghan. “Fate and the Family Sedan.” East West Film Journal 4.1 (1989): 113-134. Mouritz, Mike. “City Views.” Fast Thinking Winter 2009: 47-50. Newman, P. and J. Kenworthy. Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence. Washington DC: Island Press, 1999. Paterson, Matthew. Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Rothschilds, Emma. Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age. New York: Radom House, 1973. Rothschilds, Emma. “Can We Transform the Auto-Industrial Society?” New York Review of Books 56.3 (2009). < http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22333 >. Sheller, Mimi. “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car.” Theory, Culture and Society 21 (2004): 221–42. Simpson, Catherine. “Volatile Vehicles: When Women Take the Wheel.” Womenvision. Ed. Lisa French. Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 2003. 197-210. Urry, John. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2000. Urry, John. “Connections.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 27-37. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge, and Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2008. Urry, John. “Climate Change, Travel and Complex Futures.” British Journal of Sociology 59. 2 (2008): 261-279. Watts, Laura, and John Urry. “Moving Methods, Travelling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (2008): 860-874. Wutkowski, Karey. “Auto Execs' Private Flights to Washington Draw Ire.” Reuters News Agency 19 Nov. 2008. < http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4AI8C520081119 >.

Causal attributions are an element of a frame (Entman, 1991). Furthermore, a causal attribution organizes the anatomy of a problem within a text. Hereby, causal attributions provide explanations of problems in terms of their expectations, the underlying reasons or the causes that led to one or more problems depicted in the text. Entry connected to framing devices cultural motifs Field of Application/Theoretical Foundation The causal attributions variable is used in both deductive and inductive framework analyses (e.g., Boesman & Van Gorp, 2018; Cools et al., 2024; Van Gorp, 2007, 2010). Frame analyses with a socio-constructionist approach (Van Gorp, 2007) discuss a strong correlation of causal attributions with cultural motifs (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989). However and in the context of journalistic articles in particular, the main aim tends to depict the facts and problems of an event that is being discussed and to be able to understand and solve it. To that, causal attributions are – presumably – more closely linked to the problem definition than to the cultural motifs. In other words, not every problem may be underpinned by a cultural dimension in a press release, but it is far more likely to be underpinned by a causal attribution. References/Combination with other methods of data collection Causal attributions refer to a causal interpretation of an event or an actors’ statement, while also highlighting certain aspects of cultural motifs. This may be a result of “discursive negotiation”. Example studies: Pentzold & Knorr (2024); Pentzold & Fischer (2017); Van Gorp & Vercruysse (2012) Information on Van Gorp & Vercruysse, 2012 Authors: Baldwin Van Gorp and Tom Vercruysse Research questions: What are the dominant frames used to represent dementia and what alternative frames could be proffered? Object of analysis: An inductive frame analysis to examine the various ways in which the media define dementia both in news aggregates and in audio-visual material from the internet. The aim is to find indications of how and what conceptions people gain of dementia through news, audiovisual material, novels, and public health brochures. Hereby, the analysis followed an initial three-step coding procedure: First, the authors conducted the material inductively by coding key terms, with regular feedback moments to discuss potential divergences. This first phase ended when no new frames were detected, followed by an axial coding procedure of the whole material during phase two. Here, every new passage from the material had to be connected to at least one frame package so to verify the pre-defined frames from phase one. Third and lastly, frame packages were created by linking both reasoning devices and framing devices with a cultural theme. Time frame of analysis and analyzed media type: The sample consisted of a representative selection of Belgian newspaper coverage from March 1, 2008 to July 1, 2010. In addition, books about dementia (n=20) were examined together with (audio-)visual material (n=14) based on the search results for “dementia” on www.imdb.com and www.youtube.com. Finally, public health brochures of dementia were part of the sample (n=15). Information about variable Variable/name definition: Frames/frame packages that define dementia Scale: Nominal Level of analysis: In the beginning by paragraph level, then the whole text as the frames began to emerge more clearly. Sample operationalization: A frame / frame package consists of seven elements. These are the following: (1) cultural theme; (2) definition of the problem; (3) cause (why is it a problem?); (4) consequences; (5) moral values involved; (6) possible solutions/actions; (7) metaphors, choice of vocabulary. Values: The qualitative analysis resulted in a total of twelve frame packages (six frames and six counter-frames). Each consists of a central cultural theme, a definition of dementia, the causes and possible consequences, the moral evaluation and possible future scenarios of dementia. (1A. Dualism of body and mind vs. 1B. Unity of body and mind; 2; The invader; 3. The strange travelling companion; 4A. Faith in science vs. 4B. Natural ageing; 5. The fear of death and degeneration; 6. Carpe diem; 7A. Reversed roles vs. 7B. Each in turn; 8A. No quid pro quo vs. 8B. The Good Mother) Reliability: First, both authors coded independently of each other and met to discuss differences. This resulted in tentative frames which were used for further qualitative research of the material. Then, the frames found were discussed with experts (in a workshop setting). Codebook: Description of the sample (newspapers and audiovisual material) can be found at the end of the article (appendix of Van Gorp & Vercruysse, 2012). Information on Pentzold & Knorr, 2024 Authors: Christian Pentzold and Charlotte Knorr Research questions: With which imaginaries do journalistic reports make sense of Big Data? (RQ1) How do these imaginaries evolve over time? (RQ2) To what extent are the imaginaries similar or different across countries? (RQ3) Object of analysis [and analyzed media type]: The project Framing Big Data (DFG 2021-2024) analyzed the media-communicatively articulated frames on “Big Data” in online newspapers and magazines from three countries: South Africa, Germany, and the United States. No visual material was collected or examined. In total, material from 26 newspapers and magazines was analyzed. The time frame ranged from 2011 to 2020 (N=1,456). Articles had to contain the keywords “big data” or “dataf*” (e.g., datafication, datafied) in the headline, sub-headline and/or first paragraph (sampling criteria). To analyze the frames manually, it was assumed that frames are organized according to three levels analysable in a press text. First, the reasoning devices, followed by – secondly – the framing devices (references, argumentation patterns, idioms, metaphors, topoi) and – thirdly – the cultural motifs. Coming from a socio-constructionist approach, a cultural motif is the anchor of an idea expressed in a text (Van Gorp, 2010, p. 7). It is connected to a social problem. To understand this connection, the problem definition, causal attribution, treatment recommendation, and moral evaluation associated with the coded cultural motif were analyzed (cf., Van Gorp, 2010, p. 91-92; Entman, 1991, p. 52). These four elements are the reasoning devices of a frame. They are accompanied by the so-called framing devices which are stylistic devices, catchphrases, metaphors, and references. To that end, for the manual frame analysis on Big Data in the press aggregates, we developed codes for framing devices (1), reasoning devices (2), and cultural motifs (3). All three elements form part of a frame package (Van Gorp, 2007, 2010). To build the frame packages, we followed procedures of both block modeling and cluster analysis. First, a block modeling was conducted – as introduced by White for structural analyses (White et al., 1976) – to prepare the data set for the cluster analysis. Then, the coded cultural motifs, the reasoning devices, and the framing devices that correlated strongly in the data set (a total of 9 variables and 34 codes) were chosen. With that, a hierarchical cluster analysis (Ward method) was conducted (Matthes & Kohring, 2008, p. 268). Binary variables were calculated for each of the codes of the nine variables. Time frame of analysis: 2011, Jan 1 – 2020, Dec 31 Codebook: Public_Codebook_FBD_fin.pdf Information about the variable Variable name/definition: Causal Attributions Scale: Nominal Level of analysis: Whereas the formal categories in the manual content analysis were coded at the level of a single news item, the individual frame elements were coded at the level of propositional units. A propositional unit (= analysis unit) can be connected to several codes that are assigned to either a framing device, a reasoning device or a cultural motif. Not all but some frame elements had to be present in the news item, and at least one reasoning device. Furthermore, at least one reasoning device should be tied to a framing device and/or cultural motif to prove that the propositional unit contains semantic relationships and not just elements of “raw text” (van Atteveldt, 2008, p. 5). Sample operationalization Causal attributions are part of reasoning devices that include a problem definition, a causal attribution, a treatment recommendation, and a moral evaluation. To identify a causal attribution, we asked: What causes, reasons or expectations are associated with big data while others are ignored? How does an articulated cause, reason or expectation shape a concrete problem of big data while hiding others? Either as expectations (following the conviction/hope etc. to …) OR reasons (in order to…) OR as causes (because of …) for big data. (multiple causal attributions can be coded per article; but only one per propositional unit) Values: see Table 1. Reliability: α = .669 [Krippendorff’s alpha, intercoder reliability. A total of seven reliability tests were conducted, five of them during the coding phase and two as part of two pretests. Five coders were involved in four tests, four coders were involved in three tests. All tests were conducted in the period July 2022 to December 2022]. Table 1 Values used for the variable causal attributions described for Big Data (Pentzold & Knorr, 2024). Code Label Description 1 advances in health and medicine, self-optimization (mostly expectations associated with Big Data); Big Data is used to predict future health and to cure / heal diseases; also research purposes for scientific purposes (to find something out) 2 military/governmental exploitation new technologies (AI, drones and robots) collect data and/or can be used for surveillance and defense, for military intelligence, police investigations, data for security: push-pull between privacy and security in the digital age 3 data as resource to make profit / sell data, also meta data; Advances in workflows: detailed information about consumers/workers/employees: data profiles (consumers, economic dimension), profiling social behavior and mobility patterns, consumer behavior, social media marketing, analyzing meta data to predict the future of what people will buy (not) buy, predicting consumer trends, changes on the labor market, economic developments, the machines that store data and the technologies that collect it are becoming increasingly efficient. this can save costs. 4 detailed information about voters; behavioural microtargeting (political dimension) voter mobilization; predicting voting behavior 5 networked architectures (macro) databases are globally connected, the technical infrastructures are already established, lower costs for data collection and storage, people are proceeded into data; free Services from companies for the price of some data, monitoring as default citizens get used to 6 risks of datafication are abstract, not considered (macro) lack of citizen interest and privacy interests in Big Data, “trends and changes are neglected” 7 deficient laws politically not regulated, in-transparency of contracts, police investigations are not regulated, grappling with balance of power: who will make decisions for us in the future? Ubiquitous mass surveillance; lack of expertise in handling Big Data (lack of organization of accumulated Big Data), persistence of data as data shadows (in the most negative sense: identities can be stolen) 8 Terror attacks in the past Big data analyses to prevent terrorist attacks like 9/11 9 something else/ nothing detected Note: No multiple coding. References Boesman, J., & Van Gorp, B. (2018). Driving The Frame: How News Values, News Pegs, and Story Angles Guide Journalistic Frame Building. In P. D’Angelo (Ed.), Communication Series. Doing news framing analysis II: Empirical and theoretical perspectives (Second edition, pp. 112–134). New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Cools, H., Van Gorp, B., & Opgenhaffen, M. (2024). Where exactly between utopia and dystopia? A framing analysis of AI and automation in US newspapers. Journalism, 25(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849221122647 Entman, R. M. (1991). Framing U.S. Coverage of International News: Contrasts in Narratives of the KAL and Iran Air Incidents: Symposium. Journal of Communication, 41(4), 6–27. Gamson, W. A., & Modigliani, A. (1989). Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach. American Journal of Sociology, 95(1), 1–37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2780405 Jasanoff, S. (2015). Future Imperfect. In S. Jasanoff & S. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity (pp. 1–33). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matthes, J., & Kohring, M. (2008). The Content Analysis of Media Frames: Toward Improving Reliability and Validity. Journal of Communication, 58(2), 258–279. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.00384.x Pentzold, C., & Fischer, C. (2017). Framing Big Data: The discursive construction of a radio cell query in Germany. Big Data & Society, July-December, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717745897 Pentzold, C. & Knorr, C. (2024). Making Sense of “Big Data”: Ten Years of Discourse Around Datafication (ICA 2024, 74th Conference, Gold Coast, Australia). Pentzold, C., & Knorr, C. (2021-2024). Framing Big Data (DFG). Leipzig University. https://www.sozphil.uni-leipzig.de/en/institut-fuer-kommunikations-und-medienwissenschaft/professuren/chair-of-media-and-communication/forschungs-und-praxisprojekte/framing-big-data van Atteveldt, W. (2008). Semantic network analysis: Techniques for extracting, representing and querying media content. SIKS dissertation series: no. 2008-30. BookSurge. Van Gorp, B. (2007). The Constructionist Approach to Framing: Bringing Culture Back In. Communication Research, 57, 60–78. Van Gorp, B. (2010). Strategies to Take Subjectivity Out of Framing Analysis. In P. D´Angelo & J. A. Kuypers (Eds.), Communication Series. Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives (pp. 84–109). New York: Routledge. Van Gorp, B., & Vercruysse, T. (2012). Frames and counter-frames giving meaning to dementia: A framing analysis of media content. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 74(8), 1274–1281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.12.045 White, H. C., Boorman, S. A., & Breiger, R. L. (1976). Social Structure from Multiple Networks. I. Blockmodels of Roles and Positions. American Journal of Sociology, 81(4), 730–780. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2777596

IllegitimacyBack in 1987, Gregory Bateson argued that:Kurt Vonnegut gives us wary advice – that we should be careful what we pretend because we become what we pretend. And something like that, some sort of self-fulfilment, occurs in all organisations and human cultures. What people presume to be ‘human’ is what they will build in as premises of their social arrangements, and what they build in is sure to be learned, is sure to become a part of the character of those who participate. (178)The human capacity to marginalise and discriminate against others on the basis of innate and constructed characteristics is evident from the long history of discrimination against people whose existence is ‘illegitimate’, defined as being outside the law. What is inside or outside the law depends upon the context under consideration. For example, in societies such as ancient Greece and the antebellum United States, where slavery was legal, people who were constructed as ‘slaves’ could legitimately be treated very differently from ‘citizens’: free people who benefit from a range of human rights (Northup). The discernment of what is legitimate from that which is illegitimate is thus implicated within the law but extends into the wider experience of community life and is evident within the civil structures through which society is organised and regulated.The division between the legitimate and illegitimate is an arbitrary one, susceptible to changing circumstances. Within recent memory a romantic/sexual relationship between two people of the same sex was constructed as illegitimate and actively persecuted. This was particularly the case for same-sex attracted men, since the societies regulating these relationships generally permitted women a wider repertoire of emotional response than men were allowed. Even when lesbian and gay relationships were legalised, they were constructed as less legitimate in the sense that they often had different rules around the age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual couples. In Australia, the refusal to allow same sex couples to marry perpetuates ways in which these relationships are constructed as illegitimate – beyond the remit of the legislation concerning marriage.The archetypal incidence of illegitimacy has historically referred to people born out of wedlock. The circumstances of birth, for example whether a person was born as a result of a legally-sanctioned marital relationship or not, could have ramifications throughout an individual’s life. Stories abound (for example, Cookson) of the implications of being illegitimate. In some social stings, such as Catherine Cookson’s north-eastern England at the turn of the twentieth century, illegitimate children were often shunned. Parents frequently refused permission for their (legitimate) children to play with illegitimate classmates, as if these children born out of wedlock embodied a contaminating variety of evil. Illegitimate children were treated differently in the law in matters of inheritance, for example, and may still be. They frequently lived in fear of needing to show a birth certificate to gain a passport, for example, or to marry. Sometimes, it was at this point in adult life, that a person first discovered their illegitimacy, changing their entire understanding of their family and their place in the world. It might be possible to argue that the emphasis upon the legitimacy of a birth has lessened in proportion to an acceptance of genetic markers as an indicator of biological paternity, but that is not the endeavour here.Given the arbitrariness and mutability of the division between legitimacy and illegitimacy as a constructed boundary, it is policed by social and legal sanctions. Boundaries, such as the differentiation between the raw and the cooked (Lévi-Strauss), or S/Z (Barthes), or purity and danger (Douglas), serve important cultural functions and also convey critical information about the societies that enforce them. Categories of person, place or thing which are closest to boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate can prompt existential anxiety since the capacity to discern between these categories is most challenged at the margins. The legal shenanigans which can result speak volumes for which aspects of life have the potential to unsettle a culture. One example of this which is writ large in the recent history of Australia is our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and the impact of this upon Australia’s multicultural project.Foreshadowing the sexual connotations of the illegitimate, one of us has written elsewhere (Green, ‘Bordering on the Inconceivable’) about the inconceivability of the Howard administration’s ‘Pacific solution’. This used legal devices to rewrite Australia’s borders to limit access to the rights accruing to refugees upon landing in a safe haven entitling them to seek asylum. Internationally condemned as an illegitimate construction of an artificial ‘migration zone’, this policy has been revisited and made more brutal under the Abbot regime with at least two people – Reza Barati and Hamid Khazaei – dying in the past year in what is supposed to be a place of safety provided by Australian authorities under their legal obligations to those fleeing from persecution. Crock points out, echoing the discourse of illegitimacy, that it is and always has been inappropriate to label “undocumented asylum seekers” as “‘illegal’” because: “until such people cross the border onto Australian territory, the language of illegality is nonsense. People who have no visas to enter Australia can hardly be ‘illegals’ until they enter Australia” (77). For Australians who identify in some ways – religion, culture, fellow feeling – with the detainees incarcerated on Nauru and Manus Island, it is hard to ignore the disparity between the government’s treatment of visa overstayers and “illegals” who arrive by boat (Wilson). It is a comparatively short step to construct this disparity as reflecting upon the legitimacy within Australia of communities who share salient characteristics with detained asylum seekers: “The overwhelmingly negative discourse which links asylum seekers, Islam and terrorism” (McKay, Thomas & Kneebone, 129). Some communities feel themselves constructed in the public and political spheres as less legitimately Australian than others. This is particularly true of communities where members can be identified via markers of visible difference, including indicators of ethnic, cultural and religious identities: “a group who [some 585 respondent Australians …] perceived would maintain their own languages, customs and traditions […] this cultural diversity posed an extreme threat to Australian national identity” (McKay, Thomas & Kneebone, 129). Where a community shares salient characteristics such as ethnicity or religion with many detained asylum seekers they can become fearful of the discourses around keeping borders strong and protecting Australia from illegitimate entrants. MethodologyThe qualitative fieldwork upon which this paper is based took place some 6-8 years ago (2006-2008), but the project remains one of the most recent and extensive studies of its kind. There are no grounds for believing that any of the findings are less valid than previously. On the contrary, if political actions are constructed as a proxy for mainstream public consent, opinions have become more polarised and have hardened. Ten focus groups were held involving 86 participants with a variety of backgrounds including differences in age, gender, religious observance, religious identification and ethnicity. Four focus groups involved solely Muslim participants; six drew from the wider Australian community. The aim was to examine the response of different communities to mainstream Australian media representations of Islam, Muslims, and terrorism. Research questions included: “Are there differences in the ways in which Australian Muslims respond to messages about ‘fear’ and ‘terror’ compared with broader community Australians’ responses to the same messages?” and “How do Australian Muslims construct the perceptions and attitudes of the broader Australian community based on the messages that circulate in the media?” Recent examples of kinds of messages investigated include media coverage of Islamic State’s (ISIS’s) activities (Karam & Salama), and the fear-provoking coverage around the possible recruitment of Australians to join the fighting in Syria and Iraq (Cox). The ten focus groups were augmented by 60 interviews, 30 with respondents who identified as Muslim (15 males, 15 female) and 30 respondents from the broader community (same gender divisions). Finally, a market research company was commissioned to conduct a ‘fear survey’, based on an established ‘fear of rape’ inventory (Aly and Balnaves), delivered by telephone to a random sample of 750 over-18 y.o. Australians in which Muslims formed a deliberative sub-group, to ensure they were over-sampled and constituted at least 150 respondents. The face-to-face surveys and focus groups were conducted by co-author, Dr Anne Aly. General FindingsMuslim respondents indicate a heightened intensity of reaction to media messages around fear and terror. In addition to a generalised fear of the potential impact of terrorism upon Australian society and culture, Muslim respondents experienced a specific fear that any terrorist-related media coverage might trigger hostility towards Muslim Australian communities and their own family members. According to the ‘fear survey’ scale, Muslim Australians at the time of the research experienced approximately twice the fear level of mainstream Australian respondents. Broader Australian community Australian Muslim communityFear of a terrorist attackFear of a terrorist attack combines with the fear of a community backlashSpecific victims: dead, injured, bereavedCommunity is full of general victims in addition to any specific victimsShort-term; intense impactsProtracted, diffuse impactsSociety-wide sympathy and support for specific victims and all those involved in dealing with the trauma and aftermathSociety-wide suspicion and a marginalisation of those affected by the backlashVictims of a terrorist attack are embraced by broader communityVictims of backlash experience hostility from the broader communityFour main fears were identified by Australian Muslims as a component of the fear of terrorism:Fear of physical harm. In addition to the fear of actual terrorist acts, Australian Muslims fear backlash reprisals such as those experienced after such events as 9/11, the Bali bombings, and attacks upon public transport passengers in Spain and the UK. These and similar events were constructed as precipitating increased aggression against identifiable Australian Muslims, along with shunning of Muslims and avoidance of their company.The construction of politically-motivated fear. Although fear is an understandable response to concerns around terrorism, many respondents perceived fears as being deliberately exacerbated for political motives. Such strategies as “Be alert, not alarmed” (Bassio), labelling asylum seekers as potential terrorists, and talk about home-grown terrorists, are among the kinds of fears which were identified as politically motivated. The political motivation behind such actions might include presenting a particular party as strong, resolute and effective. Some Muslim Australians construct such approaches as indicating that their government is more interested in political advantage than social harmony.Fear of losing civil liberties. As well as sharing the alarm of the broader Australian community at the dozens of legislative changes banning people, organisations and materials, and increasing surveillance and security checks, Muslim Australians fear for the human rights implications across their community, up to and including the lives of their young people. This fear is heightened when community members may look visibly different from the mainstream. Examples of the events fuelling such fears include the London police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian Catholic working as an electrician in the UK and shot in the month following the 7/7 attacks on the London Underground system (Pugliese). In Australia, the case of Mohamed Hannef indicated that innocent people could easily be unjustly accused and wrongly targeted, and even when this was evident the political agenda made it almost impossible for authorities to admit their error (Rix).Feeling insecure. Australian Muslims argue that personal insecurity has become “the new normal” (Massumi), disproportionately affecting Muslim communities in both physical and psychological ways. Physical insecurity is triggered by the routine avoidance, shunning and animosity experienced by many community members in public places. Psychological insecurity includes fear for the safety of younger members of the community compounded by concern that young people may become ‘radicalised’ as a result of the discrimination they experience. Australian Muslims fear the backlash following any possible terrorist attack on Australian soil and describe the possible impact as ‘unimaginable’ (Aly and Green, ‘Moderate Islam’).In addition to this range of fears expressed by Australian Muslims and constructed in response to wider societal reactions to increased concerns over radical Islam and the threat of terrorist activity, an analysis of respondents’ statements indicate that Muslim Australians construct the broader community as exhibiting:Fear of religious conviction (without recognising the role of their own secular/religious convictions underpinning this fear);Fear of extremism (expressed in various extreme ways);Fear of powerlessness (responded to by disempowering others); andFear of political action overseas having political effects at home (without acknowledging that it is the broader community’s response to such overseas events, such as 9/11 [Green ‘Did the world really change?’], which has also had impacts at home).These constructions, extrapolations and understandings by Australian Muslims of the fears of the broader community underpinning the responses to the threat of terror have been addressed elsewhere (Green and Aly). Legitimate Australian MuslimsOne frustration identified by many Muslim respondents centres upon a perceived ‘acceptable’ way to be an Australian Muslim. Arguing that the broader community construct Muslims as a homogenous group defined by their religious affiliation, these interviewees felt that the many differences within and between the twenty-plus national, linguistic, ethnic, cultural and faith-based groupings that constitute WA’s Muslim population were being ignored. Being treated as a homogenised group on a basis of faith appears to have the effect of putting that religious identity under pressure, paradoxically strengthening and reinforcing it (Aly, ‘Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism’). The appeal to Australian Muslims to embrace membership in a secular society and treat religion as a private matter also led some respondents to suggest they were expected to deny their own view of their faith, in which they express their religious identity across their social spheres and in public and private contexts. Such expression is common in observant Judaism, Hinduism and some forms of Christianity, as well as in some expressions of Islam (Aly and Green, ‘Less than equal’). Massumi argues that even the ways in which some Muslims dress, indicating faith-based behaviour, can lead to what he terms as ‘affective modulation’ (Massumi), repeating and amplifying the fear affect as a result of experiencing the wider community’s fear response to such triggers as water bottles (from airport travel) and backpacks, on the basis of perceived physical difference and a supposed identification with Muslim communities, regardless of the situation. Such respondents constructed this (implied) injunction to suppress their religious and cultural affiliation as akin to constructing the expression of their identity as illegitimate and somehow shameful. Parallels can be drawn with previous social responses to a person born out of wedlock, and to people in same-sex relationships: a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of denial.Australian Muslims who see their faith as denied or marginalised may respond by identifying more strongly with other Muslims in their community, since the community-based context is one in which they feel welcomed and understood. The faith-based community also allows and encourages a wider repertoire of acceptable beliefs and actions entailed in the performance of ‘being Muslim’. Hand in hand with a perception of being required to express their religious identity in ways that were acceptable to the majority community, these respondents provided a range of examples of self-protective behaviours to defend themselves and others from the impacts of perceived marginalisation. Such behaviours included: changing their surnames to deflect discrimination based solely on a name (Aly and Green, ‘Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror’); keeping their opinions private, even when they were in line with those being expressed by the majority community (Aly and Green, ‘Moderate Islam’); the identification of ‘less safe’ and ‘safe’ activities and areas; concerns about visibly different young men in the Muslim community and discussions with them about their public behaviour and demeanour; and women who chose not to leave their homes for fear of being targeted in public places (all discussed in Aly, ‘Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism’). Many of these behaviours, including changing surnames, restricting socialisation to people who know a person well, and the identification of safe and less safe activities in relation to the risk of self-revelation, were common strategies used by people who were stigmatised in previous times as a result of their illegitimacy.ConclusionConstructions of the legitimate and illegitimate provide one means through which we can investigate complex negotiations around Australianness and citizenship, thrown into sharp relief by the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers, also deemed “illegals”. Because they arrive in Australia (or, as the government would prefer, on Australia’s doorstep) by illegitimate channels these would-be citizens are treated very differently from people who arrive at an airport and overstay their visa. The impetus to exclude aspects of geographical Australia from the migration zone, and to house asylum seekers offshore, reveals an anxiety about borders which physically reflects the anxiety of western nations in the post-9/11 world. Asylum seekers who arrive by boat have rarely had safe opportunity to secure passports or visas, or to purchase tickets from commercial airlines or shipping companies. They represent those ethnicities and cultures which are currently in turmoil: a turmoil frequently exacerbated by western intervention, variously constructed as an il/legitimate expression of western power and interests.What this paper has demonstrated is that the boundary between Australia and the rest, the legitimate and the illegitimate, is failing in its aim of creating a stronger Australia. The means through which this project is pursued is making visible a range of motivations and concerns which are variously interpreted depending upon the position of the interpreter. The United Nations, for example, has expressed strong concern over Australia’s reneging upon its treaty obligations to refugees (Gordon). Less vocal, and more fearful, are those communities within Australia which identify as community members with the excluded illegals. The Australian government’s treatment of detainees on Manus Island and Nauru, who generally exhibit markers of visible difference as a result of ethnicity or culture, is one aspect of a raft of government policies which serve to make some people feel that their Australianness is somehow less legitimate than that of the broader community. AcknowledgementsThis paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP0559707), 2005-7, “Australian responses to the images and discourses of terrorism and the other: establishing a metric of fear”, awarded to Professors Lelia Green and Mark Balnaves. The research involved 10 focus groups and 60 individual in-depth interviews and a telephone ‘fear of terrorism’ survey. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members and wider Australian respondents to the telephone survey. ReferencesAly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 33.3 (Feb 2010): 268-81.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “Less than Equal: Secularism, Religious Pluralism and Privilege.” M/C Journal 11.2 (2008). 15 Oct. 2009 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/32›.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen”. M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). 13 April 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08-aly-green.php›.Aly, Anne, and Mark Balnaves. “‘They Want Us to Be Afraid’: Developing a Metric for the Fear of Terrorism. International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities & Nations 6.6 (2008): 113-122.Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.Bassio, Diana. “‘Be Alert, Not Alarmed’: Governmental Communication of Risk in an Era of Insecurity.” Annual Conference Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005. ‹http://www.anzca.net/documents/anzca-05-1/refereed-proceedings-9/247-be-alert-not-alarmed-governmental-communication-of-risk-in-an-era-of-insecurity-1/file.html›.Bateson, Gregory, and Mary Catherine Bateson. “Innocence and Experience”. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. New York: Hampton Press, 1987. 167-182. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.oikos.org/baten.htm›.Cookson, Catherine. Our Kate. London: Corgi, 1969.Cox, Nicole. “Police Probe ‘Die for Syria’ Car Stickers”. WA Today 11 Sep. 2014. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/police-probe-die-for-syria-car-stickers-20140911-10fmo7.html›.Crock, Mary. “That Sinking Feeling: Correspondence”. Quarterly Essay 54 (June 2014): 75-79.Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1978 [1966].Gordon, Michael. “New UN Human Rights Chief Attacks Australia over Asylum Seeker Rights ‘Violations’.” Sydney Morning Herald 7 Sep. 2014. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/new-un-human-rights-chief-attacks-australia-over-asylum-seeker-rights-violations-20140907-10dlkx.html›.Green, Lelia. “Bordering on the Inconceivable: The Pacific Solution, the Migration Zone and ‘Australia’s 9/11’”. Australian Journal of Communication 31.1 (2004): 19-36.Green, Lelia. “Did the World Really Change on 9/11?” Australian Journal of Communication 29.2 (2002): 1-14.Green, Lelia, and Anne Aly. “How Australian Muslims Construct Western Fear of the Muslim Other”. Negotiating Identities: Constructed Selves and Others. Ed. Helen Vella Bonavita. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 65-90. Karam, Zeina, and Vivian Salama. “US President Barack Obama Powers Up to Shut Down Islamic State”. The Australian 11 Sep. 2014. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.theaustralian/world/%20us-president-barak-obama-powers-up-to-shut-down-islamic-state-20140911-10f9dh.html›.Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969.Massumi, Brian. “Fear (the Spectrum Said).” Positions 13.1 (2005): 31-48.McKay, Fiona H., Samantha, L. Thomas, and Susan Kneebone. “‘It Would Be Okay If They Came through the Proper Channels’: Community Perceptions and Attitudes toward Asylum Seekers in Australia”. Journal of Refugee Studies 25.1 (2011): 113-133.Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. New York: Derby & Miller, 1853.Pugliese, Joseph. “Asymmetries of Terror: Visual Regimes of Racial Profiling and the Shooting of John Charles de Menezes in the Context of the War in Iraq.” Borderlands 5.1 (2006). 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol5no1_2006/pugliese.htm›.Rix, M. “With Reckless Abandon: Haneef and Ul-Haque in Australia’s ‘War on Terror’.” In K. Michael and M.G. Micheal (eds.), The Third Workshop on the Social Implications of National Security Australia. Canberra, July 2008. 107-122. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=gsbpapers›.Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1977.Wilson, Lauren. “More Visa Over-Stayers than Asylum-Seekers”. The Australian 11 Oct. 2012. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/immigration/more-visa-over-stayers-than-asylum-seekers/story-fn9hm1gu-1226493178289›.

In the contemporary era, media spectacle organizes and mobilizes economic life, political conflict, social interactions, culture, and everyday life. My recently published book Media Spectacle explores a profusion of developments in hi-tech culture, media-driven society, and spectacle politics. Spectacle culture involves everything from film and broadcasting to Internet cyberculture and encompasses phenomena ranging from elections to terrorism and to the media dramas of the moment. For ‘Logo’, I am accordingly sketching out briefly a terrain I probe in detail in the book from which these examples are taken.1 During the past decades, every form of culture and significant forms of social life have become permeated by the logic of the spectacle. Movies are bigger and more spectacular than ever, with high-tech special effects expanding the range of cinematic spectacle. Television channels proliferate endlessly with all-day movies, news, sports, specialty niches, re-runs of the history of television, and whatever else can gain an audience. The rock spectacle reverberates through radio, television, CDs, computers networks, and extravagant concerts. The Internet encircles the world in the spectacle of an interactive and multimedia cyberculture. Media culture excels in creating megaspectacles of sports championships, political conflicts, entertainment, "breaking news" and media events, such as the O.J. Simpson trial, the Death of Princess Diana, or the sex or murder scandal of the moment. Megaspectacle comes as well to dominate party politics, as the political battles of the day, such as the Clinton sex scandals and impeachment, the 36 Day Battle for the White House after Election 2000, and the September 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent Terror War. These dramatic media passion plays define the politics of the time, and attract mass audiences to their programming, hour after hour, day after day. The concept of "spectacle" derives from French Situationist theorist Guy Debord's 1972 book Society of the Spectacle. "Spectacle," in Debord's terms, "unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena" (Debord 1970: #10). In one sense, it refers to a media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles. Spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society's basic values, and dreams and nightmares, putting on display dominant hopes and fears. They serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its conflicts and modes of conflict resolution. They include sports events, political campaigns and elections, and media extravaganzas like sensational murder trials, or the Bill Clinton sex scandals and impeachment spectacle (1998-1999). As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming ever more technologically dazzling and are playing an increasingly central role in everyday life. Under the influence of a postmodern image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, a semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and drama, which deeply influence thought and action. For Debord: "When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society" (#18). Today, however, I would maintain it is the multimedia spectacle of sight, sound, touch, and, coming to you soon, smell that constitutes the multidimensional sense experience of the new interactive spectacle. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a "permanent opium war" (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life -- recovering the full range of their human powers through creative praxis. The concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in passively consuming spectacles, one is separated from actively producing one's life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals passively observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The situationist project by contrast involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice. Since Debord's theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an "entertainment economy," business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.2 Via the "entertainmentization" of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).3 In a competitive business world, the "fun factor" can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers' attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and dining out are coded as an "experience," as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, it has to be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and "links to other cool sites." To succeed in the ultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace. Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s. Entertainment has always been a prime field of the spectacle, but in today's infotainment society, entertainment and spectacle have entered into the domains of the economy, politics, society, and everyday life in important new ways. Building on the tradition of spectacle, contemporary forms of entertainment from television to the stage are incorporating spectacle culture into their enterprises, transforming film, television, music, drama, and other domains of culture, as well as producing spectacular new forms of culture such as cyberspace, multimedia, and virtual reality. For Neil Gabler, in an era of media spectacle, life itself is becoming like a movie and we create our own lives as a genre like film, or television, in which we become "at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show" (1998: 4). On Gabler’s view, we star in our own "lifies," making our lives into entertainment acted out for audiences of our peers, following the scripts of media culture, adopting its role models and fashion types, its style and look. Seeing our lives in cinematic terms, entertainment becomes for Gabler "arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time--a force so overwhelming that it has metastasized into life" to such an extent that it is impossible to distinguish between the two (1998: 9). As Gabler sees it, Ralph Lauren is our fashion expert; Martha Stewart designs our sets; Jane Fonda models our shaping of our bodies; and Oprah Winfrey advises us on our personal problems.4 Media spectacle is indeed a culture of celebrity who provide dominant role models and icons of fashion, look, and personality. In the world of spectacle, celebrity encompasses every major social domain from entertainment to politics to sports to business. An ever-expanding public relations industry hypes certain figures, elevating them to celebrity status, and protects their positive image in the never-ending image wars and dangers that a celebrity will fall prey to the machinations of negative-image and thus lose celebrity status, and/or become figures of scandal and approbation, as will some of the players and institutions that I examine in Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003). Sports has long been a domain of the spectacle with events like the Olympics, World Series, Super Bowl, World Soccer Cup, and NBA championships attracting massive audiences, while generating sky-high advertising rates. These cultural rituals celebrate society's deepest values (i.e. competition, winning, success, and money), and corporations are willing to pay top dollar to get their products associated with such events. Indeed, it appears that the logic of the commodity spectacle is inexorably permeating professional sports which can no longer be played without the accompaniment of cheerleaders, giant mascots who clown with players and spectators, and raffles, promotions, and contests that feature the products of various sponsors. Sports stadiums themselves contain electronic reproduction of the action, as well as giant advertisements for various products that rotate for maximum saturation -- previewing environmental advertising in which entire urban sites are becoming scenes to boost consumption spectacles. Arenas, like the United Center in Chicago, America West Arena in Phoenix, on Enron Field in Houston are named after corporate sponsors. Of course, after major corporate scandals or collapse, like the Enron spectacle, the ballparks must be renamed! The Texas Ranger Ballpark in Arlington, Texas supplements its sports arena with a shopping mall, office buildings, and a restaurant in which for a hefty price one can watch the athletic events while eating and drinking.5 The architecture of the Texas Rangers stadium is an example of the implosion of sports and entertainment and postmodern spectacle. A man-made lake surrounds the stadium, the corridor inside is modeled after Chartes Cathedral, and the structure is made of local stone that provides the look of the Texas Capitol in Austin. Inside there are Texas longhorn cattle carvings, panels of Texas and baseball history, and other iconic signifiers of sports and Texas. The merging of sports, entertainment, and local spectacle is now typical in sports palaces. Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, Florida, for instance, "has a three-level mall that includes places where 'fans can get a trim at the barber shop, do their banking and then grab a cold one at the Budweiser brew pub, whose copper kettles rise three stories. There is even a climbing wall for kids and showroom space for car dealerships'" (Ritzer 1998: 229). Film has long been a fertile field of the spectacle, with "Hollywood" connoting a world of glamour, publicity, fashion, and excess. Hollywood film has exhibited grand movie palaces, spectacular openings with searchlights and camera-popping paparazzi, glamorous Oscars, and stylish hi-tech film. While epic spectacle became a dominant genre of Hollywood film from early versions of The Ten Commandments through Cleopatra and 2001 in the 1960s, contemporary film has incorporated the mechanics of spectacle into its form, style, and special effects. Films are hyped into spectacle through advertising and trailers which are ever louder, more glitzy, and razzle-dazzle. Some of the most popular films of the late 1990s were spectacle films, including Titanic, Star Wars -- Phantom Menace, Three Kings, and Austin Powers, a spoof of spectacle, which became one of the most successful films of summer 1999. During Fall 1999, there was a cycle of spectacles, including Topsy Turvy, Titus, Cradle Will Rock, Sleepy Hollow, The Insider, and Magnolia, with the latter featuring the biblical spectacle of the raining of frogs in the San Fernando Valley, in an allegory of the decadence of the entertainment industry and deserved punishment for its excesses. The 2000 Academy Awards were dominated by the spectacle Gladiator, a mediocre film that captured best picture award and best acting award for Russell Crowe, thus demonstrating the extent to which the logic of the spectacle now dominates Hollywood film. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular films of 2001 are also hi-tech spectacle, such as Moulin Rouge, a film spectacle that itself is a delirious ode to spectacle, from cabaret and the brothel to can-can dancing, opera, musical comedy, dance, theater, popular music, and film. A postmodern pastiche of popular music styles and hits, the film used songs and music ranging from Madonna and the Beatles to Dolly Parton and Kiss. Other 2001 film spectacles include Pearl Harbor, which re-enacts the Japanese attack on the U.S. that propelled the country to enter World War II, and that provided a ready metaphor for the September 11 terror attacks. Major 2001 film spectacles range from David Lynch’s postmodern surrealism in Mulholland Drive to Steven Spielberg’s blending of his typically sentimental spectacle of the family with the formalist rigor of Stanley Kubrick in A.I. And the popular 2001 military film Black-Hawk Down provided a spectacle of American military heroism which some critics believed sugar-coated the actual problems with the U.S. military intervention in Somalia, causing worries that a future U.S. adventure by the Bush administration and Pentagon would meet similar problems. There were reports, however, that in Somalian cinemas there were loud cheers as the Somalians in the film shot down the U.S. helicopter, and pursued and killed American soldiers, attesting to growing anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world against Bush administration policies. Television has been from its introduction in the 1940s a promoter of consumption spectacle, selling cars, fashion, home appliances, and other commodities along with consumer life-styles and values. It is also the home of sports spectacle like the Super Bowl or World Series, political spectacles like elections (or more recently, scandals), entertainment spectacle like the Oscars or Grammies, and its own spectacles like breaking news or special events. Following the logic of spectacle entertainment, contemporary television exhibits more hi-tech glitter, faster and glitzier editing, computer simulations, and with cable and satellite television, a fantastic array of every conceivable type of show and genre. TV is today a medium of spectacular programs like The X-Files or Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and spectacles of everyday life such as MTV's The Real World and Road Rules, or the globally popular Survivor and Big Brother series. Real life events, however, took over TV spectacle in 2000-2001 in, first, an intense battle for the White House in a dead-heat election, that arguably constitutes one of the greatest political crimes and scandals in U.S. history (see Kellner 2001). After months of the Bush administration pushing the most hardright political agenda in memory and then deadlocking as the Democrats took control of the Senate in a dramatic party re-affiliation of Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, the world was treated to the most horrifying spectacle of the new millennium, the September 11 terror attacks and unfolding Terror War that has so far engulfed Afghanistan and Iraq. These events promise an unending series of deadly spectacle for the foreseeable future.6 Hence, we are emerging into a new culture of media spectacle that constitutes a novel configuration of economy, society, politics, and everyday life. It involves new cultural forms, social relations, and modes of experience. It is producing an ever-proliferating and expanding spectacle culture with its proliferating media forms, cultural spaces, and myriad forms of spectacle. It is evident in the U.S. as the new millennium unfolds and may well constitute emergent new forms of global culture. Critical social theory thus faces important challenges in theoretically mapping and analyzing these emergent forms of culture and society and the ways that they may contain novel forms of domination and oppression, as well as potential for democratization and social justice. Works Cited Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1967. Gabler, Neil. Life the Movie. How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Kellner, Douglas. Grand Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Kellner, Douglas. From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Kellner, Douglas. Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions. Thousand Oaks, Cal. and London: Sage, 1998. Wolf, Michael J. Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces are Transforming Our Lives. New York: Times Books, 1999. Notes 1 See Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 2 Wolf's book is a detailed and useful celebration of the "entertainment economy," although he is a shill for the firms and tycoons that he works for and celebrates them in his book. Moreover, while entertainment is certainly an important component of the infotainment economy, it is an exaggeration to say that it drives it and is actually propelling it, as Wolf repeatedly claims. Wolf also downplays the negative aspects of the entertainment economy, such as growing consumer debt and the ups and downs of the infotainment stock market and vicissitudes of the global economy. 3 Another source notes that "the average American household spent $1,813 in 1997 on entertainment -- books, TV, movies, theater, toys -- almost as much as the $1,841 spent on health care per family, according to a survey by the US Labor Department." Moreover, "the price we pay to amuse ourselves has, in some cases, risen at a rate triple that of inflation over the past five years" (USA Today, April 2, 1999: E1). The NPD Group provided a survey that indicated that the amount of time spent on entertainment outside of the home –- such as going to the movies or a sport event – was up 8% from the early to the late 1990s and the amount of time in home entertainment, such as watching television or surfing the Internet, went up 2%. Reports indicate that in a typical American household, people with broadband Internet connections spend 22% more time on all-electronic media and entertainment than the average household without broadband. See “Study: Broadband in homes changes media habits” (PCWORLD.COM, October 11, 2000). 4 Gabler’s book is a synthesis of Daniel Boorstin, Dwight Macdonald, Neil Poster, Marshall McLuhan, and other trendy theorists of media culture, but without the brilliance of a Baudrillard, the incisive criticism of an Adorno, or the understanding of the deeper utopian attraction of media culture of a Bloch or Jameson. Likewise, Gabler does not, a la cultural studies, engage the politics of representation, or its economics and political economy. He thus ignores mergers in the culture industries, new technologies, the restructuring of capitalism, globalization, and shifts in the economy that are driving the impetus toward entertainment. Gabler does get discuss how new technologies are creating new spheres of entertainment and forms of experience and in general describes rather than theorizes the trends he is engaging. 5 The project was designed and sold to the public in part through the efforts of the son of a former President, George W. Bush. Young Bush was bailed out of heavy losses in the Texas oil industry in the 1980s by his father's friends and used his capital gains, gleaned from what some say as illicit insider trading, to purchase part-ownership of a baseball team to keep the wayward son out of trouble and to give him something to do. The soon-to-be Texas governor, and future President of the United States, sold the new stadium to local taxpayers, getting them to agree to a higher sales tax to build the stadium which would then become the property of Bush and his partners. This deal allowed Bush to generate a healthy profit when he sold his interest in the Texas Rangers franchise and to buy his Texas ranch, paid for by Texas tax-payers (for sources on the scandalous life of George W. Bush and his surprising success in politics, see Kellner 2001 and the further discussion of Bush Jr. in Chapter 6). 6 See Douglas Kellner, From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Kellner, Douglas. "Engaging Media Spectacle " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>. APA Style Kellner, D. (2003, Jun 19). Engaging Media Spectacle . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>

As one of the more visible manifestations of the boom in new media, computer games have attracted a great deal of attention, both from the popular press, and from academics. In the case of the former, much of this coverage has focussed on the perceived danger games pose to the young mind, whether that danger be physical (in terms of bodily atrophy due to inactivity) or social (in terms of anti-social and even violent behaviour, caused by exposure to specific types of content). The massacre at Columbine High School in the United States seems to have further fuelled these fears, with several stories focusing on the fact that the killers were both players of violent video games (Dickinson 1999; Hansen 1999). These concerns have also found their way into political circles, promoting a seemingly endless cycle of inquiries and reports (for example, see Durkin 1995; Durkin and Aisbett 1999). Academic discourse on the subject has, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, tended to adopt a similar line, tracing out a return to the dark days of media effects theory. This is especially true of those studies that focus on the psychological aspects of computer game usage. For example, Scott (1995) conducted a study specifically aimed at investigating "to what extent, if any, aggressive computer game playing would have on individuals of different personality composition, and in which particular aspects of aggressiveness this might be experienced" (Scott 1995, 122). Similarly, Ballard (1999) examined the relationship between gender and violent computer games arguing that the level of violence depicted in a game directly affects the interaction between players of different genders. Almost without exception, these studies come from the experimental tradition of media research, often employing laboratory experiments in order to test their hypotheses. As the problems with this methodology have been covered extensively elsewhere (for example, see Hall 1982; Murdock and Golding 1977; Lowery and DeFleur 1983) I will not go into detail here, except to point out that most experimental research underestimates the importance of physical context in media use. Other studies have attempted to approach the subject from a more qualitative perspective, often utilising theories derived from post-structuralism to examine the construction of identity in games. For example, Alloway and Gilbert (1998) explore relationship between computer games and notions of masculinity, arguing that simplistic notions of effects dramatically underestimate the sophistication of the readers. Similarly, Beavis (1998) argues that it is necessary to more fully explore the relationship between games players and games before engaging in debates about the social benefits or dangers of the medium. According to Beavis: Other studies have attempted to approach the subject from a more qualitative perspective, often utilising theories derived from post-structuralism to examine the construction of identity in games. For example, Alloway and Gilbert (1998) explore relationship between computer games and notions of masculinity, arguing that simplistic notions of effects dramatically underestimate the sophistication of the readers. Similarly, Beavis (1998) argues that it is necessary to more fully explore the relationship between games players and games before engaging in debates about the social benefits or dangers of the medium. According to Beavis: However, while arguments like that of Beavis clearly take the debate in another direction, in many cases the writers find themselves mired in the same ideological paradigm as the effects theorists. While stressing the need for a more nuanced conceptualisation of the game-player relationship, Beavis also implies that games are potentially destructive, stating that "young people need to be helped to critique and resist the subject positions and ideologies of video games" (Beavis, 1998). In response, the games industry itself has launched several attacks on the academic community, many of which, ironically, are framed in the kind of aggressive terminology the researchers are themselves concerned about. For example, Green argues, But for a group of academics to draw sweeping conclusions about an industry they are so obviously clueless about, based on a ludicrous, half-assed experiment that sounds like something out of a Simpsons episode, adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. (136) While it could be argued that Green's "from the hip" response itself adds little to the dialogue, it does serve to highlight one of the more surprising aspects of the computer games debate. As Green asserts, it is apparent that many of the scholars conducting research into computer games seem to know very little about the subject they are studying, a situation analogous to television researchers watching only cinematic films. Indeed, given the descriptions some researchers give of particular games, it is doubtful that they have actually played the game themselves, raising questions about the extent to which they are authorities in the area. This paper is, at least in part, aimed at rectifying this situation, by providing some broad commentary on the specific characteristics of the game medium. For the sake of convenience, I will be focussing mainly on games available on home consoles such as the Sony Playstation, and will restrict my argument to single-player games. Computer games are clearly a distinct form of media; while many are played through established technology like televisions and computers, there would seem to be something intrinsically different about their mode of address. This is primarily a function of their interactivity; unlike most forms of media, computer games respond to direct input from their audience. However, at the same time, games also display characteristics that are, at least superficially, similar to existing media forms. While games are often categorised according to the type of action required of the player (eg shooting, driving, puzzle-solving etc), they can also readily be categorised into the same genres used for other entertainment media such as films and video cassettes. Games can be based on sports, action, drama, comedy and even music, although admittedly the broad category of "simulation" game has no direct counterpart in film and video, except, perhaps philosophically, for documentary. Film and television genres are traditionally defined in terms of a set of key textual characteristics, with iconography, setting and narrative being perhaps the most obvious. Applying these notions to computer games it soon becomes clear why the generic classifications used for other media have been so easily adapted to the new medium. For example, the iconography of an action film like Face Off (explosions, guns, corpses etc) can all be found in an action game such as Syphon Filter. Similarly, the settings of horror films like I Know What You Did Last Summer (old houses, dark alleys etc) are all faithfully reproduced in horror games like Resident Evil. These correlations are true of most filmic genres and computer games, to such an extent that there is a growing trend in crossover production of "game of the film" (eg. Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Hard, Independence Day) and "film of the game" (Pokémon, Mortal Kombat) texts. When we turn our attention to narrative, however, the situation becomes somewhat more complex. Like films and television programs, games usually have definite beginning and end points, but what happens between these points seems, at least superficially, to be dramatically different. Regardless of their genre, films and television programs are self-propelling entities; the actions of the characters drive the narrative forward toward some kind of resolution. In the case of a television series, this resolution might only be partial, but at the end of the program's duration there is still some kind of finality to the narrative process, albeit temporary. Games, on the other hand, are designed for extended and often repeated playing, and as such necessarily resist narrative closure, and therefore have to provide pleasure for the player in other ways. In some cases, games adopt a strategy that is similar in many ways to episodic television; the game is divided in into several "sub-games", with overall narrative resolution only being achieved through the successful completion of the sub-games. A good example of this is Dreamworks' Medal of Honor, a first-person action game set is World War Two. In order to complete the game, players must successfully carry out a series of missions, which are themselves divided into several tasks. In keeping with the action orientation of the genre, these tasks usually involve destroying some piece of military equipment, and players are rewarded based upon their proficiency in carrying them out. What is especially interesting about games like Medal of Honor is their ability to create an illusion of narrative freedom; players can effectively dictate the course the narrative takes depending on how they perform certain tasks. Resident Evil and its sequels take this concept one step further, creating a virtual gaming environment in which the player is seemingly free to go wherever they want. However, while the players are free to dictate the narrative flow at the level of what I have termed the sub-game, completion of the overall game (and therefore narrative closure) requires the player to follow a rigidly pre-established path through the game's levels. Players could in theory spend days wandering the desolate landscape of Resident Evil 2, but they just wouldn't get anywhere. Other genres of game present different problems in terms of narrative progression, and indeed some would argue that certain games progress without possessing a narrative at all. Racing games are the most obvious example of this; driving around the same track for up to 80 laps does not constitute a narrative as it is traditionally conceptualised. However, racing games are increasingly adopting narrative conventions in order to deepen the gaming experience. Formula One 99, for example, allows the player to take the place of any of the drivers from the 1999 Formula One season, accruing points depending on finishing position in the same way as the real championship. In this context, each race operates as a sub-game, and the successful completion of each race allows the game as a whole to be completed. A slightly different take on the idea of a racing narrative is taken by Gran Turismo, a game that quickly became the most successful title from Sony's Polyphony Digital. Over the traditional racing format, Polyphony superimposed a narrative based on the game's own fictional economy. Players begin the game with enough credits to purchase a low-performance vehicle, which can then be upgraded as players win races and earn enough credits to afford the necessary parts. In this way, Gran Turismo generates a narrative that is described by the player's quest to constantly purchase faster and better cars, a narrative which, given the game's 400-car menu, can take months to reach its conclusion. One aspect of computer game narratives that has surprisingly received little attention to this point is the introductory video: the short animated sequence used to set the scene for the game that follows. Typically, these sequences are created entirely from computer generated images, and in terms of genre, perform a similar function to film trailers. As well as introducing the main characters, introductory videos inform the player about the type of game they're about to play, whether it be a racing game like Gran Turismo or a sports simulation like Cricket 2000. More importantly, introductory videos also work to discursively position the player within the narrative, providing them with information about the subject positions they are permitted to assume. For fighting-based action games like Tekken and its sequels, the introductory video provides information about all the characters in the game, telling the player that they can assume any one of the multiple identities the game offers. Other games, like Medal of Honor, are much more restrictive in terms of their subject possibilities, allowing the player to adopt only one role in the single-player version. In fact, the introductory video for Medal of Honor explicitly positions the player in a very narrowly-defined role, using a first person voice over to instruct the player that they will be acting as a particular American soldier, "Jimmy Patterson". However, even games that offer very limited latitude in terms of subject positioning can still be open to radical interpretation. The very interactivity that differentiates games from other forms of audio-visual media means that players can actively "read against" the narrative provided for them, driving the game toward new (but still inherently limited) conclusions. For example, players of Medal of Honor can attempt to achieve the game's goals through stealth rather than violence, a tactic which, interestingly, always results in a lower score. Similarly, players of some racing games can usurp the game's internal logic, substituting the goal of a race win with one of vehicular destruction. The key here is that pleasure seems to be derived through a complex relationship between the player-driven narrative and the narrative imposed by the game engine. This notion of the "resistant" reading of game narratives serves to demonstrate that the relationship between the player and game text is more complex than it at first appears; certainly it is more complex than simple media effects studies imply. What is needed now is a more rigorous investigation of both the textual characteristics of the game medium, and of how players interact with those characteristics. It is only after such an investigation has been carried out that a more constructive dialogue on the socio-cultural implications of game playing can be begun. References Alloway, N., and P. Gilbert. "Video Game Culture: Playing with Masculinity, Violence and Pleasure." Wired-up: Young People and the Electronic Media. Ed. S. Howard. London: UCL Press, 1996. Ballard, M. E. "Video Game Violence and Confederate Gender: Effects on Reward and Punishment Given." Sex Roles: A Journal of Research Oct. 1999: 541. Beavis, C. "Computer Games: Youth Culture, Resistant Readers and Consuming Passions." 1998. 23 Mar. 2000 <http://www.swin.edu.au/aare/98pap/bea98139.php>. Dickinson, A. "Where Were the Parents?" Time 153.17 (1999): 40. Durkin, K., and K. Aisbett. Computer Games and Australians Today. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1999. Durkin, K. Computer Games: Their Effects on Young People. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1995. Green, J. "The Violence Problem -- And My Humble Solution: Kill the Academics." Computer Gaming World July 2000: 136. Hall, S. "The Rediscovery of Ideology; The Return of the Repressed in Media Studies." Culture, Society and The Media. Ed. M. Gurevitch et al. London: Methuen, 1982. Hansen, G. "The Violent World of Video Games." Insight on the News 15.24: 14. Lowery, S., and M. L. DeFleur. Milestones in Mass Communications Research: Media Effects. New York: Longman, 1983. Murdock, G., and P. Golding. "Capitalism, Communication and Class Relations." Mass Communication and Society. Ed. J. Curran et al. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Scott, D. "The Effect of Video Games on Feelings of Aggression." The Journal of Psychology 129.2 (1995): 121-134. Games and Films Cited Face Off. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1997. Formula One 99. Sony Playstation Game. Psygnosis, 1999. Gran Turismo. Sony Playstation Game. Polyphony Digital, 1999. I Know What You Did Last Summer. Film. Sony Pictures, 1997. Independence Day. Sony Playstation Game. Fox Interactive, 1998. Mortal Kombat. New Line Pictures, 1995. Pokémon. Film. Warner Brothers, 1999. Resident Evil. Sony Playstation Game. Capcom, 1997. Resident Evil 2. Sony Playstation Game. Capcom, 1998. Syphon Filter. Sony Playstation Game. Sony Interactive, 1999. Tekken. Sony Playstation Game. Namco, 1997. Tomorrow Never Dies. Sony Playstation Game. Electronic Arts, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Mark Finn. "Computer Games and Narrative Progression." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/narrative.php>. Chicago style: Mark Finn, "Computer Games and Narrative Progression," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/narrative.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Mark Finn. (2000) Computer games and narrative progression. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/narrative.php> ([your date of access]).

Our daily environment is surrounded by a paradoxically silent and invisible flow: the coming and going of data through our network cables, routers and wireless devices. This data is not just 1s and 0s, but bits of the conversations, images, sounds, thoughts and other forms of information that result from our interaction with the world around us. If we can speak of a global ambience, it is certainly derived from this constant flow of data. It is an endless murmur that speaks to our machines and gives us a sense of awareness of a certain form of surrounding that is independent from our actual, physical location. The constant “presence” of data around us is something that we have become largely aware of. Already in 1994, Phil Agre stated in an article in WIRED Magazine: “We're so accustomed to data that hardly anyone questions it” (1). Agre indicated that this data is in fact a representation of the world, the discrete bits of information that form the reality we are immersed in. He also proposed that it should be “brought to life” by exploring its relationships with other data and the world itself. A decade later, these relationships had become the core of the new paradigm of the World Wide Web and our interaction with cyberspace. As Mitchell Whitelaw puts it: “The web is increasingly a set of interfaces to datasets ... . On the contemporary web the data pour has become the rule, rather than the exception. The so-called ‘web 2.0’ paradigm further abstracts web content into feeds, real-time flows of XML data” ("Art against Information"). These feeds and flows have been used by artists and researchers in the creation of different forms of dynamic visualisations, in which data is mapped according to a set of parameters in order to summarise it in a single image or structure. Lev Manovich distinguishes in these visualisations those made by artists, to which he refers as “data art”. Unlike other forms of mapping, according to Manovich data art has a precise goal: “The more interesting and at the end maybe more important challenge is how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society” (15). Therefore, data artists extract from the bits of information available in cyberspace a dynamic representation of our contemporary environment, the ambience of our digital culture, our shared, intimate and at the same time anonymous, subjectivity. In this article I intend to present some of the ways in which artists have dealt with the murmur of data creatively, exploring the immense amounts of user generated content in forms that interrogate our relationship with the virtual environment and the global community. I will discuss several artistic projects that have shaped the data flow on the Internet in order to take the user back to a state of contemplation, as a listener, an observer, and finally encountering the virtual in a physical form. Listening The concept of ambience particularly evokes an auditory experience related to a given location: in filmmaking, it refers to the sounds of the surrounding space and is the opposite of silence; as a musical genre, ambient music contributes to create a certain atmosphere. In relation to flows of data, it can be said that the applications that analyze Internet traffic and information are “listening” to it, as if someone stands in a public place, overhearing other people's conversations. The act of listening also implies a reception, not an emission, which is a substantial distinction given the fact that data art projects work with given data instead of generating it. As Mitchell Whitelaw states: “Data here is first of all indexical of reality. Yet it is also found, or to put it another way, given. ... Data's creation — in the sense of making a measurement, framing and abstracting something from the flux of the real — is left out” (3). One of the most interesting artistic projects to initially address this sort of “listening” is Carnivore (2001) by the Radical Software Group. Inspired by DCS1000, an e-mail surveillance software developed by the FBI, Carnivore (which was actually the original name of the FBI's program) listens to Internet traffic and serves this data to interfaces (clients) designed by artists, which interpret the provided information in several ways. The data packets can be transformed into an animated graphic, as in amalgamatmosphere (2001) by Joshua Davis, or drive a fleet of radio controlled cars, as in Police State (2003) by Jonah Brucker-Cohen. Yet most of these clients treat data as a more or less abstract value (expressed in numbers) that serves to trigger the reactions in each client. Carnivore clients provide an initial sense of the concept of ambience as reflected in the data circulating the Internet, yet other projects will address this subject more eloquently. Fig. 1: Ben Rubin, Mark Hansen, Listening Post (2001-03). Multimedia installation. Photo: David Allison.Listening Post (2001-04) by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin is an installation consisting of 231 small electronic screens distributed in a semicircular grid [fig.1: Listening Post]. The screens display texts culled from thousands of Internet chat rooms, which are read by a voice synthesiser and arranged synchronically across the grid. The installation thus becomes a sort of large panel, somewhere between a videowall and an altarpiece, which invites the viewer to engage in a meditative contemplation, seduced by the visual arrangement of the flickering texts scrolling on each screen, appearing and disappearing, whilst sedated by the soft, monotonous voice of the machine and an atmospheric musical soundtrack. The viewer is immersed in a particular ambience generated by the fragmented narratives of the anonymous conversations extracted from the Internet. The setting of the piece, isolated in a dark room, invites contemplation and silence, as the viewer concentrates on seeing and listening. The artists clearly state that their goal in creating this installation was to recreate a sense of ambience that is usually absent in electronic communications: “A participant in a chat room has limited sensory access to the collective 'buzz' of that room or of others nearby – the murmur of human contact that we hear naturally in a park, a plaza or a coffee shop is absent from the online experience. The goal of Listening Post is to collect this buzz and render it at a human scale” (Hansen 114-15). The "buzz", as Hansen and Rubin describe it, is in fact nonexistent in the sense that it does not take place in any physical environment, but is rather the imagined output of the circulation of a myriad blocks of data through the Net. This flow of data is translated into audible and visible signals, thus creating a "murmur" that the viewer can relate to her experience in interacting with other humans. The ambience of a room full of people engaged in conversation is artificially recreated and expanded beyond the boundaries of a real space. By extracting chats from the Internet, the murmur becomes global, reflecting the topics that are being shared by users around the world, in an improvised, ever-changing embodiment of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, or even a certain stream of consciousness on a planetary scale. Fig. 2: Gregory Chatonsky, L'Attente - The Waiting (2007). Net artwork. Photo: Gregory Chatonsky.The idea of contemplation and receptiveness is also present in another artwork that elaborates on the concept of the Zeitgeist. L'Attente [The Waiting] (2007) by Gregory Chatonsky is a net art piece that feeds from the data on the Internet to create an open, never-ending fiction in real time [Fig.2: The Waiting]. In this case, the viewer experiences the artwork on her personal computer, as a sort of film in which words, images and sounds are displayed in a continuous sequence, driven by a slow paced soundtrack that confers a sense of unity to the fragmented nature of the work. The data is extracted in real time from several popular sites (photos from Flickr, posts from Twitter, sound effects from Odeo), the connection between image and text being generated by the network itself: the program extracts text from the posts that users write in Twitter, then selects some words to perform a search on the Flickr database and retrieve photos with matching keywords. The viewer is induced to make sense of this concatenation of visual and audible content and thus creates a story by mentally linking all the elements into what Chatonsky defines as "a fiction without narration" (Chatonsky, Flußgeist). The murmur here becomes a story, but without the guiding voice of a narrator. As with Listening Post, the viewer is placed in the role of a witness or a voyeur, subject to an endless flow of information which is not made of the usual contents distributed by mainstream media, but the personal and intimate statements of her peers, along with the images they have collected and the portraits that identify them in the social networks. In contrast to the overdetermination of History suggested by the term Zeitgeist, Chatonsky proposes a different concept, the spirit of the flow or Flußgeist, which derives not from a single idea expressed by multiple voices but from a "voice" that is generated by listening to all the different voices on the Net (Chatonsky, Zeitgeist). Again, the ambience is conceived as the combination of a myriad of fragments, which requires attentive contemplation. The artist describes this form of interacting with the contents of the piece by making a reference to the character of the angel Damiel in Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987): “to listen as an angel distant and proximate the inner voice of people, to place the hand on their insensible shoulder, to hold without being able to hold back” (Chatonsky, Flußgeist). The act of listening as described in Wenders's character illustrates several key aspects of the above mentioned artworks: there is, on the one hand, a receptiveness, carried out by the applications that extract data from the Internet, which cannot be “hold back” by the user, unable to control the flow that is evolving in front of her. On the other hand, the information she receives is always fragmentary, made up of disconnected parts which are, in the words of the artist Lisa Jevbratt, “rubbings ... indexical traces of reality” (1). Observing The observation of our environment takes us to consider the concept of landscape. Landscape, in its turn, acquires a double nature when we compare our relationship with the physical environment and the digital realm. In this sense, Mitchell Whitelaw stresses that while data moves at superhuman speed, the real world seems slow and persistent (Landscape). The overlapping of dynamic, fast-paced, virtual information on a physical reality that seems static in comparison is one of the distinctive traits of the following projects, in which the ambience is influenced by realtime data in a visual form that is particularly subtle, or even invisible to the naked eye. Fig. 3: Carlo Zanni, The Fifth Day (2009). Net artwork. Screenshot retrieved on 4/4/2009. Photo: Carlo Zanni. The Fifth Day (2009) by Carlo Zanni is a net art piece in which the artist has created a narration by displaying a sequence of ten pictures showing a taxi ride in the city of Alexandria [Fig.3: The Fifth Day]. Although still, the images are dynamic in the sense that they are transformed according to data retrieved from the Internet describing the political and cultural status of Egypt, along with data extracted from the user's own identity on the Net, such as her IP or city of residence. Every time a user accesses the website where the artwork is hosted, this data is collected and its values are applied to the photos by cloning or modifying particular elements in them. For instance, a photograph of a street will show as many passersby as the proportion of seats held by women in national parliament, while the reflection in the taxi driver's mirror in another photo will be replaced by a picture taken from Al-Jazeera's website. Zanni addresses the viewer's perception of the Middle East by inserting small bits of additional information and also elements from the viewer's location and culture into the images of the Egyptian city. The sequence is rendered as the trailer of a political thriller, enhanced by a dramatic soundtrack and concluded with the artwork's credits. As with the abovementioned projects, the viewer must adopt a passive role, contemplating the images before her and eventually observing the minute modifications inserted by the data retrieved in real time. Yet, in this case, the ambience is not made manifest by a constant buzz to which one must listen, but quite more subtly it is suggested by the fact that not even a still image is always the same. As if observing a landscape, the overall impression is that nothing has changed while there are minor transformations that denote a constant evolution. Zanni has explored this idea in previous works such as eBayLandscape (2004), in which he creates a landscape image by combining data extracted from several websites, or My Temporary Visiting Position from the Sunset Terrace Bar (2007), in which a view of the city of Ahlen (Germany) is combined with a real time webcam image of the sky in Naples (Italy). Although they may seem self-enclosed, these online, data-driven compositions also reflect the global ambience, the Zeitgeist, in different forms. As Carlo Giordano puts it: "Aesthetically, the work aims to a nearly seamless integration of mixed fragments. The contents of these parts, reflecting political and economical issues ... thematize actuality and centrality, amplifying the author's interest in what everybody is talking about, what happens hic et nunc, what is in the fore of the media and social discourse" (16-17). A landscape made of data, such as Zanni's eBayLandscape, is the most eloquent image of how an invisible layer of information is superimposed over our physical environment. Fig. 4: Clara Boj and Diego Díaz, Red Libre, Red Visible (2004-06). Intervention in the urban space. Photo: Lalalab.Artists Clara Boj and Diego Díaz, moreover, have developed a visualisation of the actual flows of data that permeate the spaces we inhabit. In Red Libre, Red Visible [Free Network, Visible Network] (2004-06), Boj and Díaz used Augmented Reality (AR) technology to display the flows of data in a local wireless network by creating AR marker tags that were placed on the street. A Carnivore client developed by the artists enabled anyone with a webcam pointing towards the marker tag and connected to the Wi-Fi network to see in real time the data packets flowing from their computer towards the tag [Fig.4: Red Libre]. The marker tags therefore served both as a tool for the visualisation of network activity as well as a visual sign of the existence of an open network in a particular urban area. Later on, they added the possibility of inserting custom made messages, 3D shapes and images that would appear when a particular AR marker tag was seen through the lens of the webcam. With this project, Boj and Díaz give the user the ability to observe and interact with a layer of her environment that was previously invisible and in some senses, out of reach. The artists developed this idea further in Observatorio [Observatory] (2008), a sightseeing telescope that reveals the existence of Wi-Fi networks in an urban area. In both projects, an important yet unnoticed aspect of our surroundings is brought into focus. As with Carlo Zanni's projects, we are invited to observe what usually escapes our perception. The ambience in our urban environment has also been explored by Julian Oliver, Clara Boj, Diego Díaz and Damian Stewart in The Artvertiser (2009-10), a hand-held augmented reality (AR) device that allows to substitute advertising billboards with custom made images. As Naomi Klein states in her book No Logo, the public spaces in most cities have been dominated by corporate advertising, allowing little or no space for freedom of expression (Klein 399). Oliver's project faces this situation by enabling a form of virtual culture jamming which converts any billboard-crowded plaza into an unparalleled exhibition space. Using AR technology, the artists have developed a system that enables anyone with a camera phone, smartphone or the customised "artvertiser binoculars" to record and substitute any billboard advertisement with a modified image. The user can therefore interact with her environment, first by observing and being aware of the presence of these commercial spaces and later on by inserting her own creations or those of other artists. By establishing a connection to the Internet, the modified billboard can be posted on sites like Flickr or YouTube, generating a constant feedback between the real location and the Net. Gregory Chatonsky's concept of the Flußgeist, which I mentioned earlier, is also present in these works, visually displaying the data on top of a real environment. Again, the user is placed in a passive situation, as a receptor of the information that is displayed in front of her, but in this case the connection with reality is made more evident. Furthermore, the perception of the environment minimises the awareness of the fragmentary nature of the information generated by the flow of data. Embodying In her introduction to the data visualisation section of her book Digital Art, Christiane Paul stresses the fact that data is “intrinsically virtual” and therefore lacking a particular form of manifestation: “Information itself to a large extent seems to have lost its 'body', becoming an abstract 'quality' that can make a fluid transition between different states of materiality” (Paul 174). Although data has no “body”, we can consider, as Paul suggests, any object containing a particular set of information to be a dataspace in its own. In this sense, a tendency in working with the Internet dataflow is to create a connection between the data and a physical object, either as the end result of a process in which the data has been collected and then transferred to a physical form, or providing a means of physically reshaping the object through the variable input of data. The objectification of data thus establishes a link between the virtual and the real, but in the context of an artwork it also implies a particular meaning, as the following examples will show.Fig. 5: Gregory Chatonsky, Le Registre - The Register (2007). Book shelf and books. Photo: Pau Waelder. In Le Registre [The Register] (2007), Gregory Chatonsky developed a software application that gathers sentences related to feelings found on blogs. These sentences are recorded and put together in the form a 500-page book every hour. Every day, the books are gathered in sets of 24 and incorporated to an infinite library. Chatonsky has created a series of bookshelves to collect the books for one day, therefore turning an abstract process into an object and providing a physical embodiment of the murmur of data that I have described earlier [Fig.5: Le Registre]. As with L'Attente, in this work Chatonsky elaborates on the concept of Flußgeist, by “listening” to a specific set of data (in a similar way as in Hansen and Rubin's Listening Post) and bringing it into salience. The end product of this process is not just a meaningless object but actually what makes this work profoundly ironic: printing the books is a futile effort, but also constitutes a borgesque attempt at creating an endless library of something as ephemeral as feelings. In a similar way, but with different intentions, Jens Wunderling brings the online world to the physical world in Default to Public (2009). A series of objects are located in several public spaces in order to display information extracted from users of the Twitter network. Wunderling's installation projects the tweets on a window or prints them in adhesive labels, while informing the users that their messages have been taken for this purpose. The materialisation of information meant for a virtual environment implies a new approach to the concept of ambiance as described previously, and in this case also questions the intimacy of those participating in social networks. As the artist puts it: "In times of rapid change concerning communication behavior, media access and competence, the project Default to Public aims to raise awareness of the possible effects on our lives and our privacy" (Wunderling 155). Fig. 6: Moisés Mañas, Stock (2009). Networked installation. Photo: Moisés Mañas. Finally, in Stock (2009), Moisés Mañas embodies the flow of data from stock markets in an installation consisting of several trench coats hanging from automated coat hangers which oscillate when the stock values of a certain company rise. The resulting movement of the respective trench coat simulates a person laughing. In this work, Mañas translates the abstract flow of data into a clearly understandable gesture, providing at the same time a comment on the dynamics of stock markets [Fig.6: Stock]. Mañas´s project does not therefore simply create a physical output of a specific information (such as the stock value of a company at any given moment), but instead creates a dynamic sculpture which suggests a different perception of an otherwise abstract data. On the one hand, the trenchcoats have a ghostly presence and, as they move with unnatural spams, they remind us of the Freudian concept of the Uncanny (Das Umheimliche) so frequently associated with robots and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the image of a person laughing, in the context of stock markets and the current economical crisis, becomes an ironic symbol of the morality of some stockbrokers. In these projects, the ambience is brought into attention by generating a physical output of a particular set of data that is extracted from certain channels and piped into a system that creates an embodiment of this immaterial flow. Yet, as the example of Mañas's project clearly shows, objects have particular meanings that are incorporated into the artwork's concept and remind us that the visualisation of information in data art is always discretionary, shaped in a particular form in order to convey the artist's intentions. Beyond the Buzz The artworks presented in this article revealt that, beyond the murmur of sentences culled from chats and blogs, the flow of data on the Internet can be used to express our difficult relationship with the vast amount of information that surrounds us. As Mitchell Whitelaw puts it: “Data art reflects a contemporary worldview informed by data excess; ungraspable quantity, wide distribution, mobility, heterogeneity, flux. Orienting ourselves in this domain is a constant challenge; the network exceeds any overview or synopsis” (Information). This excess is compared by Lev Manovich with the Romantic concept of the Sublime, that which goes beyond the limits of human measure and perception, and suggests an interpretation of data art as the Anti-Sublime (Manovich 11). Yet, in the projects that I have presented, rather than making sense of the constant flow of data there is a sort of dialogue, a framing of the information under a particular interpretation. Data is channeled through the artworks's interfaces but remains as a raw material, unprocessed to some extent, retrieved from its original context. These works explore the possibility of presenting us with constantly renewed content that will develop and, if the artwork is preserved, reflect the thoughts and visions of the next generations. A work constantly evolving in the present continuous, yet also depending on the uncertain future of social network companies and the ever-changing nature of the Internet. The flow of data will nevertheless remain unstoppable, our ambience defined by the countless interactions that take place every day between our divided self and the growing number of machines that share information with us. References Agre, Phil. “Living Data.” Wired 2.11 (Nov. 1994). 30 April 2010 ‹http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.11/agre.if.html›. Chatonsky, Gregory. “Flußgeist, une fiction sans narration.” Gregory Chatonsky, Notes et Fragments 13 Feb. 2007. 28 Feb. 2010 ‹http://incident.net/users/gregory/wordpress/13-flusgeist-une-fiction-sans-narration/›. ———. “Le Zeitgeist et l'esprit de 'nôtre' temps.” Gregory Chatonsky, Notes et Fragments 21 Jan. 2007. 28 Feb. 2010 ‹http://incident.net/users/gregory/wordpress/21-le-zeigeist-et-lesprit-de-notre-temps/›. Giordano, Carlo. Carlo Zanni. Vitalogy. A Study of a Contemporary Presence. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2005. Hansen, Mark, and Ben Rubin. “Listening Post.” Cyberarts 2004. International Compendium – Prix Ars Electronica 2004. Ed. Hannes Leopoldseder and Christine Schöpf. Ostfildern: Hate Cantz, 2004. 112-17. ———. “Babble Online: Applying Statistics and Design to Sonify the Internet.” Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Auditory Display, Espoo, Finland. 30 April 2010 ‹http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/icad2001/proceedings/papers/hansen.pdf›. Jevbratt, Lisa. “Projects.” A::minima 15 (2003). 30 April 2010 ‹http://aminima.net/wp/?p=93&language=en›. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. [El poder de las marcas]. Barcelona: Paidós, 2007. Manovich, Lev. “Data Visualization as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime.” Manovich.net Aug. 2002. 30 April 2010 ‹http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art_2.doc›. Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003. Whitelaw, Mitchell. “Landscape, Slow Data and Self-Revelation.” Kerb 17 (May 2009). 30 April 2010 ‹http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com/2009/05/landscape-slow-data-and-self-revelation.html›. ———. “Art against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice.” Fibreculture 11 (Jan. 2008). 30 April 2010 ‹http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_whitelaw.html›. Wunderling, Jens. "Default to Public." Cyberarts 2009. International Compendium – Prix Ars Electronica 2004. Ed. Hannes Leopoldseder, Christine Schöpf and Gerfried Stocker. Ostfildern: Hate Cantz, 2009. 154-55.

The Australian Government has been actively evaluating how best to merge the functions of the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) and the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) for around two years now. Broadly, the reason for this is an attempt to keep pace with the communications media transformations we reduce to the term “convergence.” Mounting pressure for restructuring is emerging as a site of turf contestation: the possibility of a regulatory “one-stop shop” for governments (and some industry players) is an end game of considerable force. But, from a public interest perspective, the case for a converged regulator needs to make sense to audiences using various media, as well as in terms of arguments about global, industrial, and technological change. This national debate about the institutional reshaping of media regulation is occurring within a wider global context of transformations in social, technological, and politico-economic frameworks of open capital and cultural markets, including the increasing prominence of international economic organisations, corporations, and Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Although the recently concluded FTA with the US explicitly carves out a right for Australian Governments to make regulatory policy in relation to existing and new media, considerable uncertainty remains as to future regulatory arrangements. A key concern is how a right to intervene in cultural markets will be sustained in the face of cultural, politico-economic, and technological pressures that are reconfiguring creative industries on an international scale. While the right to intervene was retained for the audiovisual sector in the FTA, by contrast, it appears that comparable unilateral rights to intervene will not operate for telecommunications, e-commerce or intellectual property (DFAT). Blurring Boundaries A lack of certainty for audiences is a by-product of industry change, and further blurs regulatory boundaries: new digital media content and overlapping delivering technologies are already a reality for Australia’s media regulators. These hypothetical media usage scenarios indicate how confusion over the appropriate regulatory agency may arise: 1. playing electronic games that use racist language; 2. being subjected to deceptive or misleading pop-up advertising online 3. receiving messaged imagery on your mobile phone that offends, disturbs, or annoys; 4. watching a program like World Idol with SMS voting that subsequently raises charging or billing issues; or 5. watching a new “reality” TV program where products are being promoted with no explicit acknowledgement of the underlying commercial arrangements either during or at the end of the program. These are all instances where, theoretically, regulatory mechanisms are in place that allow individuals to complain and to seek some kind of redress as consumers and citizens. In the last scenario, in commercial television under the sector code, no clear-cut rules exist as to the precise form of the disclosure—as there is (from 2000) in commercial radio. It’s one of a number of issues the peak TV industry lobby Commercial TV Australia (CTVA) is considering in their review of the industry’s code of practice. CTVA have proposed an amendment to the code that will simply formalise the already existing practice . That is, commercial arrangements that assist in the making of a program should be acknowledged either during programs, or in their credits. In my view, this amendment doesn’t go far enough in post “cash for comment” mediascapes (Dwyer). Audiences have a right to expect that broadcasters, production companies and program celebrities are open and transparent with the Australian community about these kinds of arrangements. They need to be far more clearly signposted, and people better informed about their role. In the US, the “Commercial Alert” <http://www.commercialalert.org/> organisation has been lobbying the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to achieve similar in-program “visual acknowledgements.” The ABA’s Commercial Radio Inquiry (“Cash-for-Comment”) found widespread systemic regulatory failure and introduced three new standards. On that basis, how could a “standstill” response by CTVA, constitute best practice for such a pervasive and influential medium as contemporary commercial television? The World Idol example may lead to confusion for some audiences, who are unsure whether the issues involved relate to broadcasting or telecommunications. In fact, it could be dealt with as a complaint to the Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman (TIO) under an ACA registered, but Australian Communications Industry Forum (ACIF) developed, code of practice. These kind of cross-platform issues may become more vexed in future years from an audience’s perspective, especially if reality formats using on-screen premium rate service numbers invite audiences to participate, by sending MMS (multimedia messaging services) images or short video grabs over wireless networks. The political and cultural implications of this kind of audience interaction, in terms of access, participation, and more generally the symbolic power of media, may perhaps even indicate a longer-term shift in relations with consumers and citizens. In the Internet example, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Internet advertising jurisdiction would apply—not the ABA’s “co-regulatory” Internet content regime as some may have thought. Although the ACCC deals with complaints relating to Internet advertising, there won’t be much traction for them in a more complex issue that also includes, say, racist or religious bigotry. The DVD example would probably fall between the remits of the Office of Film and Literature Classification’s (OFLC) new “convergent” Guidelines for the Classification of Film and Computer Games and race discrimination legislation administered by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). The OFLC’s National Classification Scheme is really geared to provide consumer advice on media products that contain sexual and violent imagery or coarse language, rather than issues of racist language. And it’s unlikely that a single person would have the locus standito even apply for a reclassification. It may fall within the jurisdiction of the HREOC depending on whether it was played in public or not. Even then it would probably be considered exempt on free speech grounds as an “artistic work.” Unsolicited, potentially illegal, content transmitted via mobile wireless devices, in particular 3G phones, provide another example of content that falls between the media regulation cracks. It illustrates a potential content policy “turf grab” too. Image-enabled mobile phones create a variety of novel issues for content producers, network operators, regulators, parents and viewers. There is no one government media authority or agency with a remit to deal with this issue. Although it has elements relating to the regulatory activities of the ACA, the ABA, the OFLC, the TIO, and TISSC, the combination of illegal or potentially prohibited content and its carriage over wireless networks positions it outside their current frameworks. The ACA may argue it should have responsibility for this kind of content since: it now enforces the recently enacted Commonwealth anti-Spam laws; has registered an industry code of practice for unsolicited content delivered over wireless networks; is seeking to include ‘adult’ content within premium rate service numbers, and, has been actively involved in consumer education for mobile telephony. It has also worked with TISSC and the ABA in relation to telephone sex information services over voice networks. On the other hand, the ABA would probably argue that it has the relevant expertise for regulating wirelessly transmitted image-content, arising from its experience of Internet and free and subscription TV industries, under co-regulatory codes of practice. The OFLC can also stake its claim for policy and compliance expertise, since the recently implemented Guidelines for Classification of Film and Computer Games were specifically developed to address issues of industry convergence. These Guidelines now underpin the regulation of content across the film, TV, video, subscription TV, computer games and Internet sectors. Reshaping Institutions Debates around the “merged regulator” concept have occurred on and off for at least a decade, with vested interests in agencies and the executive jockeying to stake claims over new turf. On several occasions the debate has been given renewed impetus in the context of ruling conservative parties’ mooted changes to the ownership and control regime. It’s tended to highlight demarcations of remit, informed as they are by historical and legal developments, and the gradual accretion of regulatory cultures. Now the key pressure points for regulatory change include the mere existence of already converged single regulatory structures in those countries with whom we tend to triangulate our policy comparisons—the US, the UK and Canada—increasingly in a context of debates concerning international trade agreements; and, overlaying this, new media formats and devices are complicating existing institutional arrangements and legal frameworks. The Department of Communications, Information Technology & the Arts’s (DCITA) review brief was initially framed as “options for reform in spectrum management,” but was then widened to include “new institutional arrangements” for a converged regulator, to deal with visual content in the latest generation of mobile telephony, and other image-enabled wireless devices (DCITA). No other regulatory agencies appear, at this point, to be actively on the Government’s radar screen (although they previously have been). Were the review to look more inclusively, the ACCC, the OFLC and the specialist telecommunications bodies, the TIO and the TISSC may also be drawn in. Current regulatory arrangements see the ACA delegate responsibility for broadcasting services bands of the radio frequency spectrum to the ABA. In fact, spectrum management is the turf least contested by the regulatory players themselves, although the “convergent regulator” issue provokes considerable angst among powerful incumbent media players. The consensus that exists at a regulatory level can be linked to the scientific convention that holds the radio frequency spectrum is a continuum of electromagnetic bands. In this view, it becomes artificial to sever broadcasting, as “broadcasting services bands” from the other remaining highly diverse communications uses, as occurred from 1992 when the Broadcasting Services Act was introduced. The prospect of new forms of spectrum charging is highly alarming for commercial broadcasters. In a joint submission to the DCITA review, the peak TV and radio industry lobby groups have indicated they will fight tooth and nail to resist new regulatory arrangements that would see a move away from the existing licence fee arrangements. These are paid as a sliding scale percentage of gross earnings that, it has been argued by Julian Thomas and Marion McCutcheon, “do not reflect the amount of spectrum used by a broadcaster, do not reflect the opportunity cost of using the spectrum, and do not provide an incentive for broadcasters to pursue more efficient ways of delivering their services” (6). An economic rationalist logic underpins pressure to modify the spectrum management (and charging) regime, and undoubtedly contributes to the commercial broadcasting industry’s general paranoia about reform. Total revenues collected by the ABA and the ACA between 1997 and 2002 were, respectively, $1423 million and $3644.7 million. Of these sums, using auction mechanisms, the ABA collected $391 million, while the ACA collected some $3 billion. The sale of spectrum that will be returned to the Commonwealth by television broadcasters when analog spectrum is eventually switched off, around the end of the decade, is a salivating prospect for Treasury officials. The large sums that have been successfully raised by the ACA boosts their position in planning discussions for the convergent media regulatory agency. The way in which media outlets and regulators respond to publics is an enduring question for a democratic polity, irrespective of how the product itself has been mediated and accessed. Media regulation and civic responsibility, including frameworks for negotiating consumer and citizen rights, are fundamental democratic rights (Keane; Tambini). The ABA’s Commercial Radio Inquiry (‘cash for comment’) has also reminded us that regulatory frameworks are important at the level of corporate conduct, as well as how they negotiate relations with specific media audiences (Johnson; Turner; Gordon-Smith). Building publicly meaningful regulatory frameworks will be demanding: relationships with audiences are often complex as people are constructed as both consumers and citizens, through marketised media regulation, institutions and more recently, through hybridising program formats (Murdock and Golding; Lumby and Probyn). In TV, we’ve seen the growth of infotainment formats blending entertainment and informational aspects of media consumption. At a deeper level, changes in the regulatory landscape are symptomatic of broader tectonic shifts in the discourses of governance in advanced information economies from the late 1980s onwards, where deregulatory agendas created an increasing reliance on free market, business-oriented solutions to regulation. “Co-regulation” and “self-regulation’ became the preferred mechanisms to more direct state control. Yet, curiously contradicting these market transformations, we continue to witness recurring instances of direct intervention on the basis of censorship rationales (Dwyer and Stockbridge). That digital media content is “converging” between different technologies and modes of delivery is the norm in “new media” regulatory rhetoric. Others critique “visions of techno-glory,” arguing instead for a view that sees fundamental continuities in media technologies (Winston). But the socio-cultural impacts of new media developments surround us: the introduction of multichannel digital and interactive TV (in free-to-air and subscription variants); broadband access in the office and home; wirelessly delivered content and mobility, and, as Jock Given notes, around the corner, there’s the possibility of “an Amazon.Com of movies-on-demand, with the local video and DVD store replaced by online access to a distant server” (90). Taking a longer view of media history, these changes can be seen to be embedded in the global (and local) “innovation frontier” of converging digital media content industries and its transforming modes of delivery and access technologies (QUT/CIRAC/Cutler & Co). The activities of regulatory agencies will continue to be a source of policy rivalry and turf contestation until such time as a convergent regulator is established to the satisfaction of key players. However, there are risks that the benefits of institutional reshaping will not be readily available for either audiences or industry. In the past, the idea that media power and responsibility ought to coexist has been recognised in both the regulation of the media by the state, and the field of communications media analysis (Curran and Seaton; Couldry). But for now, as media industries transform, whatever the eventual institutional configuration, the evolution of media power in neo-liberal market mediascapes will challenge the ongoing capacity for interventions by national governments and their agencies. Works Cited Australian Broadcasting Authority. Commercial Radio Inquiry: Final Report of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Sydney: ABA, 2000. Australian Communications Information Forum. Industry Code: Short Message Service (SMS) Issues. Dec. 2002. 8 Mar. 2004 <http://www.acif.org.au/__data/page/3235/C580_Dec_2002_ACA.pdf >. Commercial Television Australia. Draft Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice. Aug. 2003. 8 Mar. 2004 <http://www.ctva.com.au/control.cfm?page=codereview&pageID=171&menucat=1.2.110.171&Level=3>. Couldry, Nick. The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age. London: Routledge, 2000. Curran, James, and Jean Seaton. Power without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting and New Media in Britain. 6th ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Dept. of Communication, Information Technology and the Arts. Options for Structural Reform in Spectrum Management. Canberra: DCITA, Aug. 2002. ---. Proposal for New Institutional Arrangements for the ACA and the ABA. Aug. 2003. 8 Mar. 2004 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_1-4_116552,00.php>. Dept. of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. Feb. 2004. 8 Mar. 2004 <http://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/negotiations/us_fta/outcomes/11_audio_visual.php>. Dwyer, Tim. Submission to Commercial Television Australia’s Review of the Commercial Television Industry’s Code of Practice. Sept. 2003. Dwyer, Tim, and Sally Stockbridge. “Putting Violence to Work in New Media Policies: Trends in Australian Internet, Computer Game and Video Regulation.” New Media and Society 1.2 (1999): 227-49. Given, Jock. America’s Pie: Trade and Culture After 9/11. Sydney: U of NSW P, 2003. Gordon-Smith, Michael. “Media Ethics After Cash-for-Comment.” The Media and Communications in Australia. Ed. Stuart Cunningham and Graeme Turner. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002. Johnson, Rob. Cash-for-Comment: The Seduction of Journo Culture. Sydney: Pluto, 2000. Keane, John. The Media and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Lumby, Cathy, and Elspeth Probyn, eds. Remote Control: New Media, New Ethics. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2003. Murdock, Graham, and Peter Golding. “Information Poverty and Political Inequality: Citizenship in the Age of Privatized Communications.” Journal of Communication 39.3 (1991): 180-95. QUT, CIRAC, and Cutler & Co. Research and Innovation Systems in the Production of Digital Content and Applications: Report for the National Office for the Information Economy. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, Sept. 2003. Tambini, Damian. Universal Access: A Realistic View. IPPR/Citizens Online Research Publication 1. London: IPPR, 2000. Thomas, Julian and Marion McCutcheon. “Is Broadcasting Special? Charging for Spectrum.” Conference paper. ABA conference, Canberra. May 2003. Turner, Graeme. “Talkback, Advertising and Journalism: A cautionary tale of self-regulated radio”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 3.2 (2000): 247-255. ---. “Reshaping Australian Institutions: Popular Culture, the Market and the Public Sphere.” Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2001. Winston, Brian. Media, Technology and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge, 1998. Web Links http://www.aba.gov.au http://www.aca.gov.au http://www.accc.gov.au http://www.acif.org.au http://www.adma.com.au http://www.ctva.com.au http://www.crtc.gc.ca http://www.dcita.com.au http://www.dfat.gov.au http://www.fcc.gov http://www.ippr.org.uk http://www.ofcom.org.uk http://www.oflc.gov.au Links http://www.commercialalert.org/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dwyer, Tim. "Transformations" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/06-transformations.php>. APA Style Dwyer, T. (2004, Mar17). Transformations. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/06-transformations.php>